The :15-, :30- and :60-second spots have company. These standard video units are becoming anything but standard with new ways of looking at video advertising coming from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But that only scratches the surface of video when you start to look at how video content is being shared on Snapchat and live video through Facebook Live and Periscope.

The latest ad unit comes from YouTube of all platforms. It now has six-second ads called bumper ads. The ads run as pre-roll and cannot be skipped by users. YouTube views these ads as being an add-on to more holistic campaigns with longer creative, but the fact is they represent yet another ad format that advertisers need to, at the very least, think about when developing their ad campaigns.

The video ad unit ecosystem is diversifying to a massive degree.

Addressing the Symptom

All of this is happening for one reason. People hate ads for many complicated reasons, but ultimately, they represent that final hurdle between a user and the content he or she wants to consume. That explains why SNL announced that it will be cutting back on the amount of advertising on its show and replace it with more product integration in the program itself.

Advertisers and publishers have a tough challenge on their hands. Advertisers need to advertise with publishers to get their messages out there. Publishers need advertisers to monetize their content, and people want the content. What they don’t want is the advertising, so the approach taken to video advertising has been to tweak it and break it down to its smallest parts to make advertising that’s just tolerable enough for users to pay attention and advertisers to get their messages out there.

It’s a Challenge, but Maybe a Good One

There are a couple approaches advertisers can take. They can get pulled into these ad units kicking and screaming, or they can embrace them. Creative constraints often mean an opportunity to stand out. The best creative uses the strengths of a platform to overcome its weaknesses, so approaching the various video offerings means planning.

Advertisers need to choose which platforms make the most sense and create or optimize content specifically for those platforms. Often, advertisers take the same asset and share it everywhere. Cutting down a :30-second spot is going to be next to impossible for a :06-second ad. The content needs to be created for that part of the buy. There’s no recycling of assets here. So instead of taking one asset and sharing it everywhere. Create a few assets specialized for fewer channels that make the most sense.

Choices

The proliferation of video ad units is an invitation to marketers to make choices. Choices on where their videos should run and choices on what pieces they want to create that work in each of those places. The time of one asset distributed everywhere is over.