Online Video Has No Time Limits

Principle
As the rising cost of advertisements forced TV communications into shorter time slots, both political and corporate advertising styles evolved.  The 5 minute political advertisement, a positive “brand building” piece, became a single “bullet message” often contrasting or attacking an opponent.  Online video removes those time constraints, reopening an array of branding possibilities.

Best Practice
Create engaging online video content and don’t bother trying to fit your message into an arbitrary time frame.  Viewers have complete control over what they watch online, not the programmer.   Respect their ability to choose; recognize the additional freedom you’ve gained as well.

Context
A full, nuanced story requires more time to tell than the standard 30 second spot, which allows enough time to make one point only.  In politics, the trouble with shrinking the standard ad length to 30 seconds is that if the goal is to win a vote for a candidate, voters need to learn a lot about her priorities, personality, key positions, family, and history.  Conveying a sense of who she really is and how she will perform in surprise situations is impossible in 30 seconds.  These messages perhaps can be communicated through a series of 30 second ads, but that requires viewers to see enough of them for the full story to get through.  The simpler alternative is to attack your opponent with a negative ad to win a vote against him.  In an online video environment ungoverned by linear programming schedules, longer, more nuanced advertising becomes possible again.

Case Studies
The shift in the way video is chosen online warrants consideration by marketers and political candidates as they deliver their messages in this popular emerging medium (U.S. residents viewed 25.3 billion online videos in August 2009).[i]  Mark McKinnon said the lack of time and budget restraints with online video allows him to produce longer-form videos to tell a more complete story.  “I’ve got a client right now who wants to run a fairly sophisticated story, and so we’re telling it through a YouTube series, instead of TV,” McKinnon said.[ii]

To appeal to online audiences, who select content rather than receiving it passively, online videos should utilize creative story-telling, rather than negative scare tactics. 

President Barack Obama’s development of online community in his successful 2008 campaign leveraged the video on-demand trend—and contained almost no negative messaging.  Obama’s videos on his YouTube channel, for instance, have been viewed more than 22 million times.  He posted nearly 1,879 videos on a variety of subjects, and had 178,000 subscribers as of 10/12/09.[iii]

Audiences are also voting for the choice to view professional video content online.  Hulu, the online video joint venture between NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney, has increased traffic 284 percent in the past year.[iv]   NBC Universal director of strategy Jason Bergsman said the site has matched the increased cost of the additional bandwidth use by limiting the number of ads and selling close to 100 percent of its inventory.[v]  In addition to an uncluttered user interface, Hulu offers consumers instant access to their choice of programming. [vi]  This contrasts the traditional linear delivery of broadcast.