We partnered with Google, to re-imagine something as equally annoying as weeds — pre-roll ads — and turned them into an interactive product demo, by tweaking the functionality of the ‘skip ad’ button.

The pre-roll starred an annoying weed character named Prickly, who was so annoying, you’d want to kill him.

At the 5 second point of the video, the ‘Skip Ad’ button popped up, giving viewers a chance to skip our pre-roll. But, we also gave viewers a second option. A button that would let them ‘Kill Prickly’.

If viewers clicked ‘Kill Prickly’ instead of skip, they got to jump ahead in the pre-roll, to the point where Weed B Gon is used to kill the annoying weed.

Youtube

Giving viewers a choice to kill prickly or skip ad worked. While most pre-roll ads are skipped in the first few seconds, only 2% of all Prickly viewers chose to skip the ad. Instead, 98% of all viewers made it through to the end of the ad, making it one of the most successful pre-roll ads ever.