Short & To The Point
The 30’ TV advertising spot was, back in the day, sacrosanct.
It was long enough to tell a story but short enough to play in programme breaks.
As tellie became fragmented and started to merge with online, so advertising slots followed suit with a myriad of ways to get brands in front of the audience and keep the advertising cash rolling in. 10’ slots, banners, sponsorship all came into the TV game.
Online, You Tube and website video drove a horse and carriage through the old TV ad traditions with seemingly endless amounts of free time to allocate to millions of uploads.
This freedom was unexpected and caused content frenzy.
Every wannabe producer and director was uploading video of varying quality of at least 2 to 3 minutes in length.
At the same time, new online formats were being created by Vloggers and brands like Red Bull became content publishers.
It was an exciting, uncurated, experimental time.
But as online platforms like Twitter (via Vine) & Instagram impose time limits on their videos and these platforms now compete with You Tube as social video channels, the creative discipline that produced some of the most memorable TV ads is returning.
Instagram in particular offers brands a massive opportunity to use pithy, witty, serialised video ads of 15’ to engage with an audience already crazy about the platform.
It seems that the short form video ad is back with a vengeance and now has exactly the right outlet to get itself and its brand content on the social map.