Visible Measures Discuss the Long & Short of It

In this regular column, Mallory Russell, executive editor for video advertising and analytics specialist Visible Measures, which has tracked over 17,000 caigns and studied consumer behavior from three-trillion (yes, trillion) video views, looks at whether we should be pinning our creative hopes to long or short form projects.

For years, creatives were confined to telling stories in 15 or 30 seconds or, sometimes, a whole minute. Advertisers became adept at weaving tales in a short span of time for television audiences. Then online video came along and shook up the whole game.

Online video afforded brands the opportunity to produce longer content. No longer restricted by television commercial breaks, brands used the new medium to explore the idea of longer form content – ads clocking in at more than a minutes turned to short films, features, and web series.

For exle, Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 (the third most viewed branded video caign of all time) has garnered more than 229 million views and clocks in at nearly 30 minutes. The two most viewed caigns this year – Wren’s First Kiss (114 million views, below) and Nike’s Winner Stays  (97.9 million views, above) – are both more than three-and-a-half minutes in length.

The average length of a branded video in our database now clocks in at more than two minutes, which shows how brands have really adapted to the freedom inherent in the online space.

And yet, while online video is getting longer and is becoming more popular as a form of content, attention spans are also getting shorter. Young audiences – and teenagers, in particular – are spending more time on their mobile phones engaging with apps like Vine and Snapchat, which specialise in extremely short form content.

Now brands are finding incredibly creative ways to tell their stories in a six-second Vine videos and fleeting Snapchat pics. Industry experts have lauded Lowes, for exle, for its Vine caign that provided customers with quick home improvement tips [above]. The brand launched a dozen of 6-second videos teaching viewers how to do things like remove a stripped screw. Taco Bell used Snapchat to reintroduce its Beefy Crunch Burrito [below], while MTV has used it for behind-the-scenes peeks into its shows.

With long form content growing in popularity, and short-form content platforms all the rage, the question on the mind of marketers is where should the dollars be invested? Is the future in long or short-form content?

The answer is simple – the future lies in both.

The question each brand should be asking is not how long their content should be, but what content will engage their target audience. For some brands, a three-minute video may work best, for others it might be a series of 6-second vines, or maybe it’s a combination of both.

Google tells great stories in video that are several minutes in length, but there most popular caign last year was Chrome: For… (99.9 million views), which is made up solely of 16-second videos. Each brand must find their story first, and then find the medium and platform that allow them to tell it best.