Newspapers have reported instances of famous brands' ads running as pre-rolls to terrorist videos on YouTube. Subsequent brand safety fears have led to advertisers pulling their YouTube ads. This study, a lab experiment, tested the effects of program quality and content-particularly violent, sexual or extremist content-on pre-roll ads. The experiment used measures from studies showing significant broadcast TV content effects on mid-roll advertising, using more extreme cable TV content to increase the chances of finding significant effects on pre-roll ads. Overall, the effects were minimal, with no effects on brand attitudes, ad liking, or three ad memory components-encoding, storage, and retrieval. In contrast to research showing program context effects on mid-roll advertising, context effects (e.g., on brand safety) do not seem an issue for pre-roll ads. A brand's reputation might suffer negative effects from pre-roll advertising in other ways, however. A limitation is that this study did not re-test the effects of controversial content on mid-roll advertising.
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Bellman et al. (2018) studied this question.