What's New Video & How Do We Approach It?

The king of silent movies Charlie Chaplin famously failed to transition into the era of "talkies".

David Robinson wrote in Chaplin: His Art and Life that "Chaplin was cynical about this new medium and the technical shortcomings it presented, believing that "talkies" lacked the artistry of silent films. He was also hesitant to change the formula that had brought him such success, and feared that giving the Tramp a voice would limit his international appeal.

Sound familiar? A significant advancement of a media form creating new opportunities, yet wholesale rejection by dominant players vested in "the old ways of doing things?"

The addition of sound to film wasn't just "film with sound on it", it was clear that this watershed heralded a new kind of product and sensation, one that would demand new processes and new talents, but one that would also broaden the medium's appeal to a much larger audience, transforming the economics and the scale of the industry with them.

Charlie Chaplin's Tramp was a product finessed for the silent era and he wasn't going to let it go. Laurel & Hardy didn't seem to care that much (they struggled just carrying a ladder around).

A few months ago Google's creative director of it's tech initiative, Art Copy & Code, Ben Jones, ushered me into a basement in Cannes, with a few global creative directors of repute to share some research he'd been conducting with the team at [Google tech initiative] Art, Copy & Code in New York.

Working both with neutral test videos and also in some field research with a partner brand, Mountain Dew, Ben had systematically worked through treatments and production techniques to shake out audience responses and tastes, not through focus groups but by testing work in the field, placed and consumed completely naturally.

The project has an insightful write up here and it's well worth a deeper dive, but to cut a long story short, one of the findings was how a radical, 'non-narrative' cut of the TV commercial generated much greater engagement when consumed on mobile devices than the traditional ad approach.

We sat there in the room and I posed this question to everyone… "Would our client, our agency, our creatives, our production company, our industry, want us to reject traditional narrative form in the pursuit of engaged consumers that might demand a move to the radical and experimental?"

The expressions and grunts around to room said not. The truth is, just like Charlie Chaplin, we're all vested in a way of selling, creating and evaluating that we've all got very good at. Ben's findings tell us that a lot of what we've learnt and got very good at, is at best irrelevant, at worst downright counter-productive, and yet our whole business still tries to prop up the illusion.

So in the interests of exploring New Video, we put together a panel at London's 2015 Social Media Week, a maturing forum for progressive communicators.

To explore New Video, we didn’t want to dive into a nuanced channel conversation, but instead take a step back and get a fresh view of the whole. To do this I invited Guy Larsen, an independent filmmaker known through his work with seminal, multimillion-subscriber YouTuber Vsauce, as well as his own project that include YouTube hit Girls Who Read [below]. Also on the panel was Vysia Duffield, from Pixability, a video ad buying and marketing technology company with the largest repository of historical YouTube data."

Vysia helped with a scene setter: “With online video expected to attract 12.8 per cent of digital advertising spend by 2017, the stakes are high. Cisco predicts that video will account of 80 per cent of internet traffic by 2018.” And whilst enormous attention has been placed on optimisation, the more abstract and artistic issues around expression, storytelling and treatments have been somewhat neglected.

There's a lot of discussion about landscape versus portrait and the millisecond within a video a brand should appear for optimal recall, but few will be able to navigate the vagueries of what kind of experience works best in the actual content itself.

Google's Mountain Dew Pure Fun cut [below] isn't a story at all, it's a bunch of scenes thrown together in an attention grabbing, amusing way, something you immediately feel operates in the vernacular of 'makers' rather than brand advertisers, because the cutting style and set-up are clearly different to what you'd expect from a traditional ad.

We've seen millions of different TV ads that roughly work in the same way over the course of our lives so we're very sensitive to the codes. We can spot them a mile off and of course most online formats allow skipping or flicking to move their attention swiftly forwards.

The Mountain Dew test showed us that a different approach could yield more attention and engagement but didn’t really articulate what really counts in New Video, what is its essence and the idiosyncrasies that define it? We wanted to dig deeper…

As an independent filmmaker, Guy doesn't have to reconcile the old habits of digital channels with the conventions of brand marketing, so can go whatever way is most fruitful for growing views, subs etc. Guy had some very useful experiences to share with us about what really matters in these formats. One of these regarded the inevitable "gloss" that's added indiscriminately to brand advertising, a certain switch-off for digital audiences.

Guy says "There's lots to be said my end about it and the "speed vs payoff" dilemma that filmmakers have to juggle now when considering internet video, audience development, changes in people's quality threshold, authenticity perception, and the opportunities this might have for them.

A guy who I think really juggles everything well is TimTimFed. He can make them quick enough to hit current zeitgeists [above], include really impressive VFX [below], and is satirical enough to play off typical internet tropes and old media tropes."

Another reason to consider New Video as apposed to Old Video are a series of attributes that unite nearly all videos that exist on popular video sharing platforms.

The first is context. Platforms and the multiple communities within them are all places, with their own set of references, and memories. Their own cultures, their own jokes, their own tastes. Context is more springboard than backdrop when it comes to creating resonance and meaning in digital space. 

The second is associations. Whether we're talking about YouTube, Facebook or Vine videos (or anything else) association plays a strong role in the reading of a video’s status and significance. When Poke drew up the conceptual framework for Wembley Cup [below], the tension and drive pushing these web series forward was a lot to do with managing and stimulating the associations between the influential YouTuber accounts participating.

EE - The Wembley Cup - Series Trailer from Poke on Vimeo.

Finally, relationships, in a similar way to associations, are present in nearly every video on the web. Web videos exists as part of a much bigger network of structural connections. Whether those are algorithmic relationships with "other videos like this", or editorial links or blogs, tweets and tumbr embeds. The list goes on, but the point is important, videos do not stand alone as closed messaging collateral. 

Vysia [below centre, with Roope, right, and Guy Larsen, left]; “Pixability's data shows that each vertical industry on YouTube carries its own distinct audience and content attributes. In the beauty space on YouTube, for example, tutorial videos make up 45 per cent of content, and brand-sponsored creator giveaway videos earn more likes per view than any other type of content.” 

There is no clear mega-genres emerging as particularly dominant at this time for New Video. Long form, short form, vertical and portrait video formats are all evolving and all score well and not so well depending on the quality of content context etc as you might expect.

To encourage the healthy development of New Video, there's clearly much to overcome, but starting to try and articulate that is exists by naming it, acknowledging its’ nature and strengths and by championing the exemplars, we will find a way forward for brands and industry alike, and perhaps coin new sub-genres as they form and mature.