Why I wouldn’t lead my video strategy with Facebook ads

Whilst you can make good video in under 6 seconds ie Vine or the guys at 5secondfilms.com you’ve hit the nail on the head as to why FB would be pushing it – the minimum amount of time you can get in front of someone without pissing them off.
Hard to craft something meaningful or engaging when the starting proposition is ‘how do I least annoy someone’.

Eat more popcorn

Interesting to note that Apple’s recent content piece, The Rock x Siri – Dominate the Day, is 3min45sec long and has been viewed nearly 14 million times in 2 weeks.
Quality will out indeed!
Perhaps we should be focusing on producing engaging and entertaining content which drives genuine marketing outcomes but is crafted in such as way as to be desired by consumers.
6 second video content … what a joke! Only the most gullible and lazy marketers will buy into this.

i’d imagine this is now a reflection of how fragmented peoples lives have become, visual sound bites, yes i think facebook is the white pages of social media that is fast turning yellow, finding it hard to disseminate what facebook is about now a days.

Are we talking about “branded content” or ads? Because an “ad” can absolutely be 6 seconds: product, logo, price point, tag line. Done. It’s like out of home, but animated. Why’s that hard? Not everything we do deserves a trip to Cannes. We don’t measure 6 second ads on view time, we measure them on post event marketing outcomes. Like we should with most ads.

For “branded content”, would venture that YouTube is a better home for longer form. But we need shorter teasers to drive people there. I notice film companies run abbreviated trailers on FB, Snapchat, and Youtube (who also have 6 second ads) to drive people to much longer trailers somewhere else.

Client’s (and creatives) always seem genuinely hurt when the completion rates of their epic 60 sec TVC’s are south of 5% on Facebook (and they are always south of 5%), but maybe it’s because the first few seconds of these masterpieces (some of which, honestly, would be amazing for cinema) are usually scene setting shots of trees, or darkness or a hipster that ties back to nothing related to the brand or product.

It only takes two seconds for a Facebook user to scroll from the top of their mobile screen to the bottom. We can’t blame the audience when we bore them in this short window. We have to give them something here. They’re on Facebook, specifically, to look at content. I say make content designed for Facebook to drive better outcomes. TVCs go on TV.

@Jeff I think you nailed it. What is it about? Of course the simple answer is: time on site = ad revenue.

The nature of Facebook’s beast changed irreversibly some time ago, god knows how many updates back. It has transformed from being a relatively benign and neutral online noticeboard with a timeline of stuff from your friends and organisations you’d opted into following, into a creepy amalgamated AI algorithm that comes across to me at least like the most annoying desperate friend I could possibly ever want to meet whose base goal is seeking revenue.

My favourite ‘moment’ on Skynet, I mean Facebook, is when I push the back button on my phone to exit and it frantically tries to reload some other content that might appeal to me and make me stick around a little longer. At least I don’t think it will be around forever, like some poet once said…

‘In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.’

I remember a social media person presenting the “insight” that shorter videos are more likely to be completed. The recommendation was that we should create shorter videos to get more completed videos.

It didn’t seem to cross their mind that the reason shorter videos were more likely to be completed was because these were the ones most likely to get to the end before disinterested users inevitably scroll past.

Where does it end? Why not one second videos? The completion rates would be sublime. The world remains mad.

@ Golden Crumpets

Yeah!

@Matt “Interesting to note that Apple’s recent content piece, The Rock x Siri – Dominate the Day, is 3min45sec long and has been viewed nearly 14 million times in 2 weeks.”

Do you know how much they’ve spent pushing it with media $? I don’t – but it’s probably a lot.

I could film a piece of poo – and it will get 14 million views if I put some media $ behind it.

$$ buys reach.

I go to YouTube to watch video’s. I go to Facebook to see what my ‘friends’ are ranting about…