Advertisers need to be more creative when it comes to monetizing online video, panelists at MediaPost’s OMMA Video conference in New York agreed. And while pre-roll ads are unsatisfying to both consumers and content providers, don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

—Ron Berryman, SVP, GM Television Stations, Fox Interactive Media: We’re all testing business models over the next few years. How we monetize will change. Pre-roll is a good place to start, but this is a time of experimentation. We do find that people are watching full-length episodes, but we know we can’t treat online viewing like TV. In terms of developing revenue from different platforms, we do plan to enable downloading and renting online video.

—Rick Mandler, VP, Digital Media Advertising, Disney - ABC Television Group: We’re making money from pre-roll ads. However, repurposing TV commercials is not taking advantage of the medium. But that’s what most advertisers are giving us. A few are giving us something different, ads that take advantage of having a direct d conversation with consumers.

—Scott Levine, director of Product Marketing, AOL Video: You may be able to take an episode of Heroes or 24 and throw it up. But we can create – last night’s top video, snippets from The View – don’t know what we’re going to do without Rosie. But we can create ad packages that are something new and reflect the medium more closely. The average experience on AOL is a pre-roll spot and we are making money from it. From a CPM perspective, it’s between $20 and $60. I know that’s a wide spectrum. On one end is user-generated content, where the quality varies. On the other end, is professional, branded content like Heroes. But that’s just one form of advertising that people are coming to us. On pre-roll, publishers are asking us what’s next, post-roll, things that are more engaging. And that’s what we’re all working on.

—Karin Gilford, VP and GM, Yahoo Entertainment : We’ve focused on show brands that resonate with consumers. Some have rabid engagement, others do not have huge demand. The Yahoo TV property has grown to 1 million in May of 2006 to 15 million this past May. We’re appealing more broadly to TV fans in general, because we don’t have a network TV presence to tell people to view a show online. But we’re able to give advertisers a range of packages that do take advantage of the web, as opposed to attempting to mirror TV marketing practices.