Busch Will Plant a Tree in Your Name for Not Skipping This 'Tree-Roll' Ad

When you head for the mountains of Busch, you want plenty of trees around, too. Deutsch is helping to ensure that happens with a fun little pre-roll stunt on YouTube. 

Busch is launching a pre-roll spot called “Tree-Roll.” For every viewer that doesn’t skip the ad—but rather completes a full viewing of it—the Anheuser-Busch brand will have a tree planted in your honor (via a donation to the National Forest Foundation). 

“Pre-roll ads have kind of become a necessary evil. We all want to skip them to get to the good stuff. But what if not skipping the ad resulted in something good too? Like planting trees in our National Forests? Would you skip?” says Dan Kelleher, chief creative officer of Deutsch’s New York office. “As the first pre-roll ad that donates to a good cause upon completion, we’re confident that people’s natural inclination to help will be stronger than the inclination to skip.”

Below is a video showing how it works. (The actual “Tree-Roll” ad is different. Unlike the video below, you will be able to skip the “Tree-Roll” spot if you so choose.) 

Busch has a larger partnership with the NFF, which you can read about here.

Advertisers have been playing around with pre-roll gimmick for a while—among the notable efforts are Geico’s “Unskippable” campaign and Ikea’s “Irresistible Pointless TrueView Ads.”

You can also read Jason Sperling’s piece here on Muse about how it might be good to change the way pre-roll advertising works.