pre-sell and sales pages

Is there a general consensus on whether my pre-sell page should be hyping the particular product I'm ultimately trying to sell (like a review, testimonials, short lead in to "learn more"). Or should it provide some general information related to the niche, but not directly related to the product. (eg. "3 tips to lose weight... click here for a complete weight loss solution")

Since I'm using paid traffic I'm leaning towards the second method as it seems more genuine and less like I'm trying to sell something. In fact a lot of my competitors have ads to a generalized site full of even more ads and no specific call to action. Only one other is selling a similar product to myself.

Second, that competitor is linking to one of those long form videos that auto plays and can't be skipped ahead, and not until the very end does a order button appear. Do these videos work? I wouldn't have thought so except this person is taking several ad spaces on bing so it must be working. (Doesn't appear to be affiliate either, and they harvest email just prior to ordering). My product has one of these as well, but I specifically don't link to because it requires such a long attention span before getting to the point (I guess it warms people up though).

I intend to test and try a few different things out, just curious what the feeling is.

Well I've had my ads running for several days. Experimenting with different combinations of landing page to video vs text sales page. $170 spent on ads and $120 revenue. Initially seemed promising when I got a sell and upsell with just direct linking (via domain redirect). Now I'm not so sure, but I still think it's promising.