Pre-roll ads can be a divisive topic among marketers. With an over 90% skip rate (according to sources speaking with AdWeek), it can be easy to dismiss pre-roll video ads as inherently ineffective and not worth the cost of production. However, the actual effectiveness of pre-roll ads is a little more complex than initial statistics might suggest, with recent research finding that recall and impression can be boosted substantially by the best pre-roll ads.

So how can you make sure that your pre-roll ad is performing as well as possible? While there's no set formula, here's what the best pre-roll ads have in common.

Advertisers will agree — native advertising is hot! By presenting content that matches the appearance and tone of a trusted media site, you can build trust and engagement for your brand with potential customers, especially locally.

Native Advertising Works

Essentially, native is sponsored content that promotes your brand and is placed to emulate editorial content on a media site. It's designed to look similar to the "native" media content, such as news editorials and feature articles. The result is great brand-building tool that gives you a chance to deliver more credible, helpful information. According to an article on LinkedIn, 53 percent of users say they are more likely to look at a native ad than a banner ad, and 32 percent said they would share a native ad.

If you're interested in Facebook video marketing, you're probably aware that the social media giant has been moving aggressively into this space. In late 2014, Marketing magazine reported that Facebook had more monthly video views than YouTube. However, some smaller businesses may still be questioning if Facebook video is a valuable advertising channel for them.

Value for Small Businesses

Companies that once advertised in phone books, on billboards or through community circulars are embracing digital advertising mediums, and Facebook's geotargeting capabilities offer a low-cost, direct response opportunity. One of the big wins for advertisers is the ability to track Facebook viewer conversions and gain insight into the number of audience views versus actual sales. Even for those viewers who don't directly convert, Facebook can track still them and serve ads at a later time. This tracking ability is essential, as Facebook is pushing measurement beyond CPM.

A 2015 survey found that even though banner ads continue to be the top ad format heading into 2016, many agencies and clients are looking to grow their ad portfolio by ramping up the usage of video formats in the coming year. According to Marketing Land, native and video were regarded as the top mobile ad formats for 2016, with 44 percent of marketers who responded to this survey citing the ability to present content in a less intrusive way as their main reason for preferring these formats. However, digital video advertising goes beyond this benefit and is a medium that marketers are just beginning to scratch the surface of. Here's how marketers can use video to introduce themselves to consumers, build trust and then ultimately get the conversion.

Right before the 2015 holiday season, the FTC released new native advertising guidelines. These new regulations may sound restrictive initially, but they're really just building on existing recommendations, moving toward the goal of transparency in native advertisement. Here's everything you need to know about these newly released guidelines.

Ads Clearly Labeled

The goal of the new FTC guidelines is to help marketers ensure that consumers recognize a native ad as an ad. The FTC recommends that all ads be labeled as advertising using a font that is different from the surrounding content, and that the text's shade should stand out against the background.

Though you may not have heard of video micro-moments before, chances are good you've probably already benefited from one. Think With Google defines micro-moments as highly specific moments of intent that lead consumers to look for answers, discover new things or make decisions online, often with a mobile device. No matter whether someone is looking for a plumber to repair a leak that just sprang that morning or is trying to get estimates for a big home improvement project, consumers are looking to their mobile devices to help them solve life's everyday problems. Video micro-moments are a great way to reach them.

Banner ads and other traditional display ads haven't gone out of style, but they do face a pressing need to evolve with the times. Because the real estate on Web pages remains valuable as an advertising tool, the challenge marketers face is maximizing its potential to inspire attention, engagements and conversions.

A partial solution to this challenge is the advent of rich media ads as a form of display advertising. These ads are increasingly being deployed to local media websites — newspapers, radio, TV and other sites that see traffic from concentrated regions with specific audience interests in mind.

This two-part strategy — creating rich media ads and deploying them to relevant destinations — is driving critical gains for marketers, improving performance metrics and flexing the value of display ads, even in the face of rapid landscape evolution.

If you've been on YouTube in the past several years, chances are good you know all about pre-roll ads: the brief videos that play before the content you requested. With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of these ads are 30 seconds or shorter — but allow consumers to click a "skip ad" button after only five seconds. Though the idea of only getting five seconds to convey an incomplete message to consumers might not sound that attractive, the numbers are in, and it looks like even skipped ads are having an effect on consumers. But how is this possible?

The Power of Impressions

There's a vast gulf between clicks and impressions, and while it's tempting to just ignore inflated "impression" numbers, they're not meaningless. A recent Nielsen study commissioned by Facebook shows that you can still impact consumers who never even watch your video ad, because the single-frame impression causes a lift in brand awareness, ad recall, and purchase consideration. And viewing even just three seconds of pre-roll video without clicking or converting can create up to 47 percent of the campaign's value for ad recall, 32 percent of the value for brand awareness, and 44 percent of the value for purchase intent. Though these metrics, of course, rise dramatically for those who view an entire clip, they show that brief impressions can create significant value for marketers.

Let's face it: YouTube pre-roll ads can be pretty annoying. Sometimes it doesn't even matter how well-crafted they are. This may not be nice to say, but it's true. They interrupt user intent, are sometimes unskippable and require viewers to make additional clicks if they want to reach their desired content in a timely manner. With such negative connotations surrounding this type of advertising, it's understandable why marketers might want to skip the use of pre-roll videos and cut them from their marketing strategy. However, even though user opinions seem to be on the negative side, some surprising data shows something marketers can't ignore: These ads are actually effective!

Right now, small businesses are uniquely poised to take advantage of over-the-top ads, which, while not poised to revolutionize the TV ecosystem just yet, are certainly here to stay. These ads make use of the commercial space that's delivered over the Internet instead of through cable pipes or satellite signals, on services that don't require a pay TV package, such as HBO Now and CBS All Access, as well as some slimmed-down multichannel services like Dish's Sling TV and Sony's PlayStation Vue.