Entertainment marketing is a strategy that companies use to capture and keep the consumer's attention on their content.
The main feature of this practice is to be as original as possible in order to beat the competition and get noticed by the user. With the advent of Web 3.0 and the latest technologies, many companies have decided to move towards a mobile first philosophy - as far as marketing strategies are concerned - using social media (via mobile, precisely) as the main means of advertising campaigns.
Every day billions of active users spend hours and hours scrolling through pages and feeds, bringing brands a return in economic and promotional terms. Today, shorts video are the most effective means of creating a profitable business in modern marketing.
“Shorts”
One noteworthy phenomenon is the boom in shorts or short videos: all major social platforms have developed functionalities to create and share video shorts. According to a CISCO survey, 82% of online content will be video by 2022.
Their success is largely determined by their short duration, which allows users to use a low amount of attention to enjoy web content. But is there really such a noticeable drop in average attention span? If you are interested, find out here Attention span: the goldfish myth. Format is also key: vertical videos have become so popular that they overtake horizontal videos. The turning point originates with Instagram or Snapchat stories, and the even more recent success of the Chinese app Tik Tok.
On the other hand, in 2022 the world has become mobile, and every activity is possible from a smartphone.
Where do video shorts come from?
If we were to create a multi-stage timeline, we could consider 3 that have brought short videos to the success they are today.
In the first phase, the production of video content was only for TV purposes; the budgets required were very high and the effectiveness was considered to depend on the duration (according to the logic that 'the longer the video, the more users like it'). The second phase is profoundly marked by the birth of YouTube, the platform that allows anyone to become a content creator and share it in a public space. Moreover, the viewer can actively participate, giving his or her opinion in the comment space or leaving a 'Like' - 'Dislike'. This innovation is fundamental because it brings us to the third and final stage. The star of this era is the Tik Tok mobile app. Its structure is based on an algorithm that processes the user's movements - such as likes and comments - and creates a personalised choice of content to be shown to the user.
What's more, Tik Tok favours short content over long content, setting itself apart from its competitors and growing dramatically in the world of global video marketing.
The era of Tik Tok
Tik Tok first launched in September 2016, initially under the name Musical.ly.
According to the report that the agency WeAreSocial provides every year with the main data of the latest hi-tech news on the market, in 2022 the app will have 1 billion active users worldwide, of which 5,4 million in Italy. Its popularity has been growing steadily in recent years; at the end of 2020 it recorded 350 million downloads worldwide, an increase of 58% over the previous four months. This is all due to the CoronaVirus pandemic, which has led social users to use their smartphones more frequently and for longer periods of time.
The way it works is simple: users can create short videos using music, filters and other elements to add to their content. Moreover, the usage time exceeds any other smartphone application. 90% of users access it on a daily basis and spend around 52 minutes a day scrolling through and interacting with its content.
It is currently the most downloaded app in Apple's App Store, with 611 million downloads, including 6,4 million in Italy (data: SensorTower).
In conclusions
Following the success of Tik Tok, other equally popular social platforms have also created a space for video shorts: Instagram Reel, YouTube Shorts and several others.
This is because the digital giants have learned that using short videos to optimise a brand's entertainment marketing, the return in financial terms is immediate. In addition, the consumer has the opportunity to interact directly with the service provider, thus creating a strong and long-lasting relationship of trust.
The use of video shorts is the focal point of social communication activities and, in various ways, has taken its place at the forefront of modern advertising tools.
