• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 8, 2011

The consumer packaged goods category continues to lead in video ad spending for Q2 2011, as video ad management provider YuMe reports off of the traffic it sees to its 1500 publisher partners and a claimed 2 billion monthly video streams. The CPG segment was responsible for 17% of video spending in Q2, down from 28% in Q1. Telecom was a close second, with 16% of spend and Pharmaceuticals with 13%.

Not unrelated to the leadership of CPGs among video ad spenders, YuMe finds that 33.7% of campaigns are targeted at women, compared to 10.8% targeted to the male demo and the majority (55.5%) not targeted by gender. The most popular female niche is the 25-to-54-year-old segment, which gets 44.3% of the requests for female audience.

When it comes to ad formats, Q2 saw a slight rise in the use of custom video units (6.3%, up from 2.9%) and a slight decrease in pre-rolls (91.4%, down from 92.4%). Pre-roll completion rates edged up from 68% to 70%.  Although some statistics beg to differ we would like to believe that any uptick in completion rates has something to do with a slight move towards blessedly shorter ads. YuMe reports that in Q2 the percentage of 30-second spots it ran fell from 39% the previous quarter to 32% and that 15-second spots represented 68% of ads, up from 61%. The completion rate for 30s declined from 66% to 64% quarter to quarter while the completion rate of 15s rose from 69% to 72%. Add a little wishful thinking to admittedly tentative stats with a limited view of the universe of ad inventory, and one might think that users are responding negatively to unreasonable ad-to-content ratios. Men, by the way, appear to be slightly more tolerant of pre-rolls than women. Males have completion rates of 79% while women are at 65%.

And my wife keeps trying to argue I am the one who doesn't finish what I started.