If it’s not a secret, it sure feels like one. At the recent Beet.tv executive retreat, Lou Paskalis, a senior vice president for Bank of America, told attendees that the biggest hidden value in video marketing is with video-on-demand.

“There is something that everyday I wake up and I pick up the business section and I look and I make sure, ‘Oh good, another day that nobody caught me.’ I don’t know why other people who do what I do are not looking at video-on-demand,” Paskalis said. “Video-on-demand has a 57 percent price advantage to prime time television on a CPM basis. Video-on-demand in almost all flavors now is unskippable, including your DVR.”

It also carries an ad load that’s 40 percent less than that of broadcast television.

Bank of America buys spots on VOD content so that it can reach people when they’re in a good mood, enjoying a pleasurable moment of me-time. It can also tell successive stories during those ad breaks. That’s not only a good strategy, it’s also a smart way to avoid burning out the viewer.

“If you’ve ever had a bad video-on-demand experience where you’re watching something and you see the same commercial in each of the five ad breaks—and you want to kill the people who run Visine marketing ’cause you never want to see that Styrofoam eyeball again—you realize there’s an opportunity on a conscious and a subconscious level to make a connection with the consumer,” Paskalis said.

On the conscious level, marketers can tell a story throughout VOD ad breaks or build a case for their product, rather than simply cramming the same ad at the viewer over and over again. On a subsconscious level, they can make a connection with consumers and act as a reassuring voice.

That all happens in an environment that’s 100 percent viewable and non-skippable. If this isn’t a secret, why aren’t more video marketers buying VOD spots?

For more of Paskalis’s highly entertaining interview, watch the full video from Beet.tv (used with permission).