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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Why are PR and marketing ignoring the hottest video trend?

Why are PR and marketing ignoring the hottest video trend?

Short videos are the hot trend that PR and marketing are ignoring

An important video trend has been gaining momentum for some time. Despite the popularity of these videos, and the increasing number of them, there has been virtually no adoption of the technique among public relations, corporate communications, and marketing. They remain almost exclusively the province of the news media.

Given the communication world’s slow uptake of trends, that’s hardly surprising. Still, given what we know about how people consume videos these days and how easy it is—technically, at least—to create videos that employ these techniques, you have to wonder what’s holding brands and businesses back.

The videos are ridiculously short and require no audio. Here’s an example from Now This News, reporting on construction of the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

These videos have audio, ranging from a pulse-quickening music bed to narration or the words spoken by the subjects of the videos. Listening isn’t required, which is important when you consider that people are increasingly exposed to these videos when they autoplay in a Facebook (or other) news feed. On Facebook, audio off is the default for autoplay videos, and news organizations have figured out that getting the point across without the audio is preferable to forcing people to turn it on.

Watching videos without audio is so common, in fact, that video ads on Facebook will all feature captions. Research Facebook conducted found that 80% of people have a bad reaction when video ads blare the audio from within the feed.

Another wrinkle: More and more people are thumbing through their feeds on a phone rather than scrolling through them on a computer monitor. According to Facebook’s data, 823 million people access Facebook only on mobile devices. (That’s more than half of Facebook’s 1.4 billion monthly active users.) 65% of Facebook video views take place on mobile devices. Those autoplay videos start playing while people are on busses, in grocery checkout lines, in restaurants. Not only is the sound off by default; a lot of these people have the phone audio cranked down in order to avoid bothering others nearby.

Still, 41% of videos make no sense when played without audio, according to Facebook. They come across like this video ad from Bank of America:

Companies spending boatloads of cash on video ads that make no sense is driving the move toward default captioning. Whether you’re buying ad space in the feed or just hoping people will share your video, producing it so audio isn’t required is becoming a requirement. Building the meaning into the visuals is a better solution than having Facebook add captioning to a video that was meant to be heard as well as seen.

This will become an even bigger deal now that Twitter has announced that autoplay video ads will appear at the top of your timeline.

In addition to seeing more videos in their news feeds on phones, people are also absorbing them faster. Facebook and Twitter have both conducted research proving that people consume information differently on mobile devices. Differently how? They consume it faster than on a desktop, for one thing—1.7 seconds vs. 2.5 seconds. “People can recall mobile news feed content at a statistically significant rate after only 0.25 seconds of exposure,” according to an article jointly written by Facebook and twitter for AdAge. The authors note that people watch 100 million hours of video on Facebook daily. “When people watch the first three seconds of a video on Facebook, 65% of those people go on to watch at least 10 seconds of the video, and 45% make it to 30 seconds.” The same is basically true on Twitter.

In both cases, remember that the default is audio off.

The short videos that work without audio (but also work with it) are an obvious choice for taking advantage of these findings. It’s not just Facebook and Twitter, though. Watch any video from the news organizations and brands deploying content through Snapchat’s Discover feature; they employ the same techniques with even shorter videos designed to entice Shapchatters to tap through to the article or full video, as in the compilation of videos below:

It’s not just the media, though, using these techniques. Here’s an example from an inventor pitching an innovation (which I first saw while thumbing through my Facebook feed; it took a while to find it on YouTube):

Marketers and PR practitioners—those people desperate to build reach for their messages through social media channels—are woefully absent from the trend. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’ll be damned if one of them has shown up in any of my feeds. I asked the panel on the lastest episode of FIR, and none of them have seen this style of video used for PR or marketing. The technique makes sense for everything from announcement of company news to product promotions. If you know of one, please point me to it (especially if you produced it; I’d love to talk). In the meantime, I’m planning to produce a few of my own just to prove the point. Stay tuned.

Comments
  • 1.Great article!

    I love this style of video, we actually produced some videos in this style (upbeat background music, captions, no need to listen to understand what's going on, uploaded directly to Facebook) about a year ago for AVG Technologies.

    The videos recapped key content from the current week, with blog post/other content titles, key points from the content, and related images. It was a great way to re-promote the most important content from the week to reach a different audience within the community and a pretty innovative use of Facebook video at the time.

    I linked to one as the URL for my comment.

    Zachary Chastain | February 2016

  • 2.Pictures speak 1,000 words. Hello infographics.

    Videos speak, what, 1,000,000 words? Hello that airplane video.

    Makes sense to me.

    Ari Herzog | February 2016

  • 3.No surprise, but GE has been using these since at least the beginning of the year: https://twitter.com/generalelectric/status/683089956277886977

    Scott Monty | February 2016 | Canton, MI

  • 4.Call me a 20th-century Neanderthal, but to me this is backward. I consume lots of videos in audio-only mode, i.e., I'm in a different browser window and not looking at the visuals. I hate it when a video has no words and forces me to watch, and if they want me to actually watch it, the preferred length is under two minutes (under one is better).

    Shel Horowitz | February 2016 | Hadley, MA

  • 5."... and how easy it is—technically, at least—to create videos ..."

    Creating videos is easier than ever with existing tools. I'm sure everyone has PowerPoint, right? Did you know that it has the option to save a file as a video?

    The first step is to create a presentation that automatically advances between slides. The presentation can contain any mix of photos, text and videos, with or without audio. Then, when everything is just right, just choose "Save As", then change the file type to .MP4.

    Jonathan Haber | February 2016 | Bethesda, MD

  • 6.To Shel Horowitz (comment #4). It's backwards only if you're looking at it from a web-only experience. The reality is - especially on platforms like Facebook - that mobile consumption is increasingly the reality. Looking at it from that perspective, it's completely aligned with user behavior.

    Scott Monty | February 2016 | Canton, MI

  • 7.It looks like Facebook will provide the captions automatically now: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updated-features-for-video-ads

    Scott Monty | February 2016 | Canton, MI

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