As the Q4 2025 is right around the corner, the AdPlayer.Pro team explores some of the advantageous video ad formats that businesses can experiment with to improve their digital video ad campaign performance.
As usual, the dawn of the 4th quarter is the busiest time for digital companies, wishing to boost their brand and product visibility to online audiences through cross-platform advertising campaigns ahead of the winter holiday season.
As of September 2025, however, the pressure is even greater, with recent forecasts pointing to the slowest growth of holiday sales since the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., for instance (per Deloitte), as well as the expected 5% decline YoY in average holiday spending (per PwC).
In view of this, it becomes crucial that businesses make the most of the available digital advertising opportunities, investing their effort in the top-performing platforms and formats to achieve their target revenue objectives in Q4 2025 and beyond.
Namely, in the video advertising context, as the analysts point out, some of the trendiest formats worth testing out are closely tied to the booming mobile and CTV environments.
Pause Ads Steal the Limelight in the CTV Space
While the scope of emerging CTV ad formats is rather vast, ranging from menu & home screen ads to overlay, in-scene insertion ad units; content- /ad-squeeze-back and a whole lot of immersive ad variations; perhaps, the trendiest one in 2025 is a pause ad.
The key advantage of pause ads is that they imply significant benefits for all parties involved.
In particular, publishers value them for being highly-engaging for viewers without being disruptive, hence expecting their higher effectiveness in the CTV context at scale. At the same time, top-ranked advertisers across various market verticals perceive them as a go-to option for driving performance-linked conversions.
Non-surprisingly, the global ad industry pioneers have already demonstrated their faith in pause ads, with both direct and programmatic offers being currently available via Magnite at other SSPs.
On the downside, however, the implementation standard for pause ads in CTV environments is still on its way, with IAB’s Ad Format Hero taskforce expected to release the draft document by the end of 2025. This means that the technical setup may turn out a little tricky, depending on the integration type (via VAST, native ad units, or else) a particular ad tech provider offers.
Mobile-only Video Interstitials Remain In-demand
As the share of mobile audiences continues to grow over time, video interstitials remain one of the trendiest and most effective video formats in the dynamic mobile environments, which drive higher view-through and conversion rates, particularly compared to display formats.
From a publisher’s perspective, mobile-only video interstitial ads also deliver comparatively higher eCPMs, making them a go-to variant to experiment with during the busy holiday season.
At the same time, the most reasonable strategy is combine these units with other viewable mobile formats, like AdPlayer.Pro’s InPage & InView, available for integration in mobile apps via Webview or a mobile SDK, to maximize video ad performance.
New InBanner Video Developments Gain Traction
Alongside other video units, InBanner video ads have consistently driven significant performance uplift on standard banner placements over the past years, making the format buzzworthy ahead of Q4 2025.
However, the effectiveness of InBanner video essentially depends on the passback implementation, too, which can make or break the overall user experience both with the ad itself, and the publisher’s digital properties as a whole.
In this respect, in addition to supporting various passback implementations in the conventional post-ad context, closer to the end of Q2 2025 AdPlayer.Pro also released a new “Pre-launch Passback” feature, which enables adding a passback for in-banner display prior to the video player launch with the ad, when needed. And as the preliminary testing data shows, its use can help increase the average InBanner unit performance by ~7%, particularly in programmatic campaigns.
For more information about the new “Pre-launch Passback” functionality, please contact your dedicated account manager or email us at sales@adplayer.pro.