If you’ve spent any time browsing web sites, you have no doubt seen an outstream video ad embedded in a text-oriented web page. Outstream ads have become extremely popular because they allow publishers to tap into high video CPMs without having to actually create or syndicate video.

Now a new study from French adtech provider Sublime Skinz, conducted by Ipsos, reveals that outstream ads may also outperform traditional pre-roll ads, which are the industry’s workhorse unit. Ipsos queried 600 US adults on various metrics comparing pre-rolls with Sublime Skinz’ “Video Skinz” unit.

This unit creates a wallpaper/skin background behind the content and also autoplays a 300x250 or
970x250 sized embedded video ad at the top of the page with audio initiated on mouse-over. Examples of each size are here and here.

Participants’ recall for the Video Skinz units was approximately twice that of pre-rolls (33% vs. 15%) as was attribution (40% vs. 19%). 41% of participants also preferred the Video Skinz vs. 27% for the pre-rolls. Finally, purchase intent was up 8 points for the Video Skinz ads compared to the pre-rolls. The ads used in the tests were for Hulu.

In a briefing, Ramon Jimenez, VP of Americas for Sublime Skinz, told me he believes the better performance is due to the ads being in view longer as well as them being relatively non-intrusive. The company is using an ad network business model and has over 4,000 publishers on board. The units can also be directly sold by publishers and can also be sold programmatically.

Despite the acceptance, Ramon conceded that the Video Skinz model isn’t a fit for all publishers, who must accept the terms of being in the network.

From a user’s standpoint, it’s really hard to miss the video ad when the page loads, plus the wallpaper branding is persistent when scrolling the page. Given the performance data and the larger benefits of outstream ads, advertisers looking for new formats to break through the clutter of pre-rolls should explore Video Skinz as an option.