How to make six seconds pay: the big impact of the small video

Why short-form video is here to stay, and what you should do to make the most of the seconds... views from Twitter, Snap, Spotify, The Trade Desk and Xaxis.

Originally posted on: Campaign | October 4, 2018

And this is why Campaign and Xaxis invited brands and agencies to a Marketing Masterclass about short-form video advertising with a panel of platform and agency experts. The jam-packed audience highlighted the importance of short-form video as an effective new medium, said Campaign’s global head of media, Gideon Spanier.

The media-owners on the panel revealed that they are starting to ramp up short-form video. Twitter’s head of video advertising solutions, Lucy O’Dwyer said that shorter, snackable content sees the "most efficiencies and effectiveness".

David Shaw, Snap’s international lead - product marketing (EMEA, MENA, APAC), said the sweet spot for video advertising on Snapchat (which, unlike Twitter, has always had video at its heart) is even shorter than expected – between two and six seconds in length.

Spotify’s head of programmatic, Zuzanna Broadbent, added that Spotify is predominantly (70%) an in-app mobile platform used by millennials – and this was "the perfect storm" to launch short-form video at the start of this year.

Ads that are six seconds lend themselves well to our changing, mobile, consumer habits said Spanier: "We are spending more time on our phones – by 2020 this will be on average three hours 39 minutes every day. Swipes, taps and scrolls fuel our need for instant gratification and shrink our attention spans. Millennials lead the charge."

Spanier said that content sucks people in fast – but people ignore content faster. With only around 17% of ads watched beyond the first three seconds, creating mobile-first impact is a massive challenge.

So what is the best way to approach the format, strategically and creatively?

Brands must grab attention in the first few seconds to stop people scrolling past, hitting the brand message straight away, said Harry Harcus, UK and pan-regional managing director at Xaxis. He said that the completed views and cost-per-completed view really reveal whether brands have nailed the creative.

When Xaxis used short-form video as part of video game developer Capcom’s launch of Monster Hunter World across Twitter, Spotify and Global, they saw a huge uplift in the view through rate. The entire campaign was delivered to mobile and tablet devices and was seen in its entirety of six seconds by 57% of viewers, with nearly four out of five people watching beyond three seconds (the definition of a video view commonly used by Facebook).