It's About Time

 “I wish I had the time”
“Busy Busy Busy”
“Time is of the essence”
 
Who has time for anything anymore?

It would be great if there was a perfect sweet spot for the duration of your informational videos.
 
But it’s not that simple….there are a lot of questions that need to be answered.
 
Who is going to watching it? Where? When? And on what device?
What do they need to know? To feel? To respond to?

So, is there an optimum time for a video that markets content?
As short as possible if you ask most.

The (annoying) truth is – there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.
 
The average YouTube video sits around the four-minute mark.
Videos on Facebook are generally under the two-minute mark.
Ted Talks sit around the 18-minutes mark.
 
We watch shorter videos on our phone but are totally prepared to binge watch 12 hours of a TV series in a single weekend (The OA anyone?).
 
It’s drilled into us that we have increasingly short attention spans, but the phenomenal success of the podcast Serial, (where the episodes were all between half an hour and an hour), suggests that if the topic can hold interest, then duration is irrelevant.
 
Concise messaging can be just as (or more) effective than long-winded statements or videos.
 
At Sketch Videos we want you to get bang for your buck.
We want to make sense with your cents.

So we don’t discuss duration until we discuss content and audience and the all-important WHY. 

Because there’s no point in making a 10-minute video if a two minute one will tell the story just as well (or better). 
There’s no point making a 30 second whizz-bang-wow spot if you need to explain processes that will take a couple of minutes for your audience to fully understand.
 
Because time matters. We understand that.
And we don’t want to waste a second of yours, ours, or the audiences’ time.