Think quality not quantity – why video is so vital this Summer

Martin Galvin, director of agency sales at Specific Media, says we have a rich canvass when it comes to the possibilities around online video this summer…

This summer promises to be one of the most buoyant for advertising in recent years, with brands jostling for attention during events including the Jubilee, Euro 2012 and the Olympics.

But with millions of consumers tuning into online video channels to see Pippa Middleton’s latest outfit, Rooney failing to make an impact against a dogged French 11, or to hopefully watch Usain Bolt smash his own world record, advertisers can really capitalise.

In fact, you could say online video advertising has never had an opportunity to be so impactful.

So what makes a video really stand out? The debate continues to rage about how long videos should be to ensure audience engagement and retention. Traditionally, the web has always been dominated by short video clips. These may be the advert around the content (no doubt the one made for a TV market that orbits around 30 second thinking) or the content itself (kept brief due to bandwidth, upload restrictions, perceived attention spans, or assumed behaviour). However, as consumers become more comfortable with the internet as a primary source of entertainment we have seen longer formats become far more common.

Recent research from the ad management platform VINDICO revealed that completion rates for video ads in long-form content averaged about 88% last year, compared to 76% for short-form content. This would suggest that viewers are more than happy to watch video content longer than five minutes or so, and both numbers are pretty lively suggesting the audience wanted to be there in the first place. We must also remember that these numbers are an average – good ideas and execution attract audience, bad ideas and execution do not. (Unless they’re really, really bad…).

So this begs the question for advertisers: does it really matter whether the content is long-form or short-form, and therefore how long the advert is around it? As long as the content is creative, relevant and memorable, and the audience engaged, does it matter if a video is 20 minutes or 20 seconds long?

Take the Johnnie Walker ‘The Man Who Walked Around the World’ video for example; it’s six minutes and 27 seconds long, but at last count it has had 1,666,710 views on YouTube and has won numerous advertising awards. The ‘Walking Man’ advert was a huge success because it was filmed creatively and it’s beautifully scripted and well cast. Crucially though, it reflects the brand and appeals directly to Johnnie Walker’s key target market.

Similarly, a recent advert to raise awareness of the OCD Foundation has captured the imagination, despite being / because of the fact it is only one second long. It demonstrates perfectly the unique nature of the symptoms people with OCD suffer from, while keeping viewers engaged as you have to play the video over and over again to work out what it actually says.

Ultimately then, what it comes down to is creativity. If you match the right content – of whatever length – to the right audience in a unique, imaginative and inventive fashion, you can create powerful results that don’t require vast budgets.

Brands, along with their agencies and media partners, are the people with the motivation, resource, technology and creativity to do just that – and in the possibilities offered by the audience for online video this summer and beyond, we have a rich canvass.