Imagine yourself scrolling through social media during some free time. A video pops up in your feed. Intrigued, you start watching. 10 seconds pass and the video has yet to pull you in. Your level of intrigue drops significantly. Before you even know it, you’ve made an executive decision to keep scrolling for more intriguing content.
It’s okay. We’ve all done it!
Whether we like it or not, this is the nature of social media today. To be successful on social media, a video must gain the viewer’s attention quickly and maintain it throughout the entire video. Before social media, however, video marketing took on a completely different strategy.
Even up until the mid-2000’s, video marketing strategies involved cramming as much information into a video as possible. I’ve seen evidence of this strategy at a private boarding school, where I currently work. Three of our archived promotional videos illustrate it nicely:
- 1971 Promotional Video: 19 minutes long, film.
- 2003 Promotional Video: 16 minutes long, DVD and TV.
- 2007 Promotional Video: 8 minutes long, DVD and TV.
These videos incorporated multiple interviews and informational segments that highlighted nearly every single facet of life at a boarding school. Teixeira (2015) claims that this was the norm of pre-internet advertising, since “the main way people accessed information about new products or brands was through TV advertisements.” And for what was usually a captive or willing audience, this strategy worked just fine. Today? Not so much.
In our current advertising climate, Teixeira (2015) posits that video marketing “is much more complicated and expensive than in past because people’s attention spans are shorter and more brands compete for attention.” We are inundated with advertisements and marketing messages almost every second of our lives. Gone are the days of TV’s reign in the advertising world. Now, our phones and computers play a much bigger role.
Attracting the audience’s attention, then, is priority number one. Context is important, too. Where will a video be seen or shared? Teixeira (2015) provides even more details:
Thus, the advent of mobile multitasking and peer-to-peer sharing through social media forced a major switch in video marketing strategies. As Teixeira (2015) states, videos on social media first must “entertain to grab attention from few.” And in our never-ending news feeds, videos now have to compete for our attention. Don’t like a video? Just scroll to the next one. Rinse and repeat.
But why is this important for organizations that employ video marketing strategies? Because public image is everything, and video has the opportunity to communicate so much.
The goal of any successful marketing strategy would be to present an organization in its best light. Similarly, Goffman’s (1956) impression management theory suggests that our interactions function as performances. The social pressure of “the stage” encourages us to produce positive self-presentations. As a performance in their own right, videos serve a similar purpose. They give organizations a chance to present their best selves.
For my Organizational Textual Analysis project, I will be studying how an organization’s promotional video functions as a public performance. In getting this performance seen, I feel an organization must utilize entertainment, and not information, as a means to grab attention. Once an audience is secured, impressions can be made on a wider scale.
Watch the promotional video here.
References:
- Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Retrieved from https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf
- Teixeira, T. S. (2015, October 14). When People Pay Attention to Video Ads and Why. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/10/when-people-pay-attention-to-video-ads-and-why
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