How Concise, Powerful Video Content Elevates Your Brand

The Short Story About Video Marketing

Examining Attention-span and Content Regarding Video Ads

All marketing content needs to be concise and impactful, especially in our digital age. Video marketing content is no exception to this rule. In fact, it has to cater to shorter viewer attention spans now more than ever.

All marketing tells a story. Video marketing needs that story to be extremely engaging in order to keep the viewer’s attention. A quick video ad, with a single powerful story, will reach more people than a long video ad with multiple storylines. A good range to aim for is 30-60 seconds, unless you have an exceptionally captivating story and can stretch your content pleasingly across several minutes.

People do go to the theater to see longer films with multi-layered storylines. But, looking at commercials aired during major sporting events as an example, the most powerful, concise video marketing content has the greatest impact on viewers. Even those commercials that are longer focus on a single major point to be successful.

This storytelling applies to all video marketing, from television ads to YouTube videos to online video ads. Story doesn’t only mean an engaging plot. The story can be as simple as succinctly showing the customer how your brand or product can improve their quality of life or solve a common problem. The true key to making the video successful is staying true to the central idea of the video while being exceptionally creative as how to convey that thesis.

Let’s take a look at two examples that show what great video marketing can be, and where video marketing that tries to be too clever can fall flat.

Colorado Tourism’s “Perfect Day”

Colorado Tourism’s commercial appeals to some very central emotions in us: joy, comfort, excitement. The product is Colorado, specifically tourism and the great outdoors. It is immediately engaging by asking the viewer a thoughtful question, while leading them through the advertisement with excellent visuals, and narrating the brief story towards the call-to-action. It gives the viewer a reason to visit Colorado ski areas, and attaches an emotional connection to the skiing experience.

Burger King’s “Connected Whopper”

This second video ad aired by Burger King is very concise, but tells you nothing about the product. This piece of video marketing falls flat because it relies on an extremely shallow gimmick: Google’s voice search. I don’t know what premise is worse in this piece of video marketing: Asking the customer to search Google for information on Burger King’s Whopper sandwich, or attempting to hijack the customer’s phone or computer via the voice-activated Google search feature.

This piece of marketing by Burger King seems both condescending and oblivious to the viewer. That’s not to say that Burger King shouldn’t be commended for trying to integrate newer technologies and innovation into their ad campaign. However, they didn’t fully work through the user experience from the audience’s point of view.

Make A Connection

Video marketing content needs to inform and connect to the viewer. It needs to be concise, but relevant. It cannot ask for too many extra steps of action on the viewer’s behalf, nor can it be too intrusive. Appeal to the viewer’s attention span, tease out an emotional connection, and inform them creatively. After all, if the video resonates with the viewer, they will be far more likely to engage with your brand – whether online or in-person. That is what makes great video marketing.

Take the video we produced for People’s Fair for example. Sometimes the client doesn’t have a huge budget to create the most compelling visuals or video from scratch to tell that perfect story. But, that story can still be told. Through clever usage of graphics, audio, photographs, and some footage we were able to pull together a compelling yet brief ad that touches some of these key elements of great video marketing:

It educates about the event. It appeals to the excitement of a combined arts/music festival – thus engaging the viewer. Also, it offers the audience a call to action – directing them to the website. Best of all, we satisfied both the client and the audience.

We call that a success story.