When the internet was created, there was only text. As bandwidth and technology improved, images, then animation, proliferated. Finally, in the early 2000s, video arrived. It may seem intuitive for video to exist on the Internet, but once upon a time, there wasn’t Youtube, and flash animation was how kids got their entertainment from the web.
Nowadays, it seems like the Internet is all video—according to Contently, in 2017, 69 percent of all consumer internet traffic will be video. By 2020, it will be 82 percent. Right behind Google, Youtube is the second-most popular site in the world.
“I think video is a megatrend, almost as big as mobile,” Mark Zuckerberg says. We are visual creatures, at heart—something in our brains is deeply engaged and attracted to video. Contently found that video reaches three times as many people and gets 20 percent more attention than a standard blog post. People are more likely to share video than any other medium, spend 88 percent more time on a website with a video, and are 200-300 percent more likely to click on an email when it includes a video.
The rise of video quality on the Internet perfectly coincided with the accessibility of video creation. Nowadays, nearly everyone with a phone or computer has access to a high-quality camera and/or video editing program. The barriers to entry are low—ask any of the thousands of kids who’ve made a viral video. Knowing the effectiveness of the medium, and its ease of use today, there’s no excuse not to become a video creator oneself.
One of last year’s most successful branded videos was for Squatty Potty, a small business which makes a toilet stool. The hilarious, surreal video—“This Unicorn Changed The Way I Poop”—has now over 100 million views on Facebook and Youtube combined.
This is the future of marketing—video, meme-worthy, and focused on creating a loyal audience rather than making a direct sales pitch. And the cost of making it was, it seems, negligible. Anyone in any town in America who saved up some money could make a similar video, as long as they were willing to be creative.
Marketers would be smart to acknowledge and harness the low-cost, high-reward potential of video. While doing so, they’d also be wise to take heed of a few trends: short videos are always best—our attention spans have steadily decreased in the digital age—and indirect persuasion is most effective. Meaning, unlike the 1950s, this generation doesn’t want to feel like it’s being sold a product on its bare pros and cons—we want to be entertained by the brand’s content and make our decision based on that.
When we watch videos from Red Bull of athletes skydiving from space, we’re not thinking about the taste or effects of Red Bull. But we are deeply engaged by the exhilarating clips, and that creates a subconscious, positive connection in our brain to Red Bull.
Some go so far as to predict that all companies—from Home Depot to Popeye’s—will become media companies, inasmuch as they will produce a steady stream of entertaining visual content. This may very well be true already—after all, what is social media for these brands if not a place to produce original content to retain and attract customers?
And as 360 videos, virtual reality, personalized videos, and live streaming continue to develop, it’s easy to see that video, in all the forms it takes and will take, will become the single biggest persuader of our time. Marketers, take note.
Ellie Martin is co-founder of Startup Change Group. As author and writer, her works have been featured on Entrepreneur, Yahoo!, Wisebread and AOL, among others. She currently splits her time between her home office in New York and Israel.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllieMartin120
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellie-martin-9a5b68122
