Video marketing and brand storytelling are two of the hottest trends in marketing today, but most brands are still missing the mark when it comes to creating brand video content that consumers actually want to watch and share with their family and friends.
New research from the New York Times Consumer Insights Group revealed that 78% of video viewers watch videos to be entertained and 71% watch videos to laugh.
These are the top two reasons that respondents to a research survey provided to explain why they watch videos, but how many brand videos are actually entertaining?
Specifically, video viewers watch videos for the following reasons:
- To be entertained = 78%
- To laugh = 71%
- To learn something new = 64%
- To fill downtime = 58%
- To do something by myself = 57%
- To relax = 51%
- To do something with other people = 32%
Looking at the data from a different perspective, entertainment still prevails. When asked what the top video topics are, the survey respondents listed ten topics, and seven of them are related to entertainment, including funny videos, movies, music, television programs, sports, live-streaming content, and cultural content. Non-entertainment content, including news and current events, instructional and how-to, and weather, ranked in fourth, fifth, and eighth place, respectively.
For brand marketers, video can be an effective marketing tactic, but it’s an opportunity lost if your videos aren’t entertaining. Of course, that doesn’t mean every brand video that you publish needs to be incredibly entertaining or include a funny cat. However, you should make an effort to produce more entertaining video content than non-entertaining video content.
The NY Times Consumer Insights Group also found that video length matters. Shorter videos are more popular among viewers in all of the top 10 online video topics except movies, television programs, sports, and live-streaming content where length doesn’t matter to viewers. Funny clips should be fewer than two minutes while news, music videos, and instructional/how-to content should be fewer than five minutes. Those are the sweet spots to make the audience happy.
If you want to increase brand video views and motivate viewers to share your videos, keep your videos short and entertaining. Brand storytelling rules!
Image: S. W. Yang
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
