Short-form video = long-term success

Forty years after killing the radio star, video continues to dominate media and drive conversations in 2024. And, most importantly, video allows brands to connect with audiences directly and engage in new and exciting ways. 

The rise of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and, most significantly, TikTok shows that audience video consumption has shifted to short-form content – and this shift has turned from a trend into an ongoing reality. WARC’s new whitepaper, in association with TikTok, ‘Short-form video: How to supercharge your media mix and drive full-funnel impact’, reveals that, globally, an average user spends 34 hours a month on TikTok, 28.05 hours on YouTube, and 15.50 hours on Instagram. Together, they have more than 6bn monthly active users: that’s quite the audience.

The WARC white paper takes a deep and revealing dive into how marketers can tap into this enormous audience and leverage the inexorable rise of short-form video. 

Let’s take a look. 

Boosting reach and driving quality attention 

What’s so special about short-form video? Well, it is always available and skippable, giving it two magic ingredients: choice and curation. 

According to NRG, 56% of social video viewers say they enjoy choosing what videos they watch, and 42% cite platform-suggested videos as a defining reason why they enjoy social/video platforms. The magic doesn’t stop there. Audiences increasingly use their phones and social channels to discover brands and buy products, with Statista reporting that the social commerce penetration rate is expected to hit 25% in 2025, and continue to climb. 

Combine choice and curation with the proliferation of social commerce and the rise of video, and short-form video becomes a powerful tool for advertisers looking to rocket-boost reach to an engaged audience across an array of channels.

“Short-form video can serve as a powerful tool for reaching new audiences with products, brands and trends,” says Kris Boger, general manager, global business solutions, UK at TikTok. “This can be especially useful for retargeting later on. For example, we saw TUI drive consideration of their holidays to price-conscious consumers, driving thousands of potential holidaymakers to TUI’s website following a campaign on the platform featuring creators talking about their own budget travel hacks.”

Yet, this doesn’t make it an open goal for brands. If they aren’t serving up creative and relevant content, they are wasting their efforts to boost reach. Fortunately, short-form video can be the golden ticket to quality attention. Predictive recommendation systems serve up video content in keeping with the user’s interests through three key qualities: 

• Immediate: Because short-form content engages the neural networks associated with intuitive, quick and automatic processing, short-form video gains attention in a way that is less effortful
• Immersive: Short-form video draws audiences in and engages them through full-screen, sound-on content that creates an immersive experience, served by predictive recommendation systems
• Multisensory: By incorporating visual, auditory and sometimes textual elements, short-form video engages multiple senses, which can lead to richer information processing

“Platforms like TikTok are full-screen, sound-on and entertaining – they capture your full attention when on the app,” says Boger, “because of this, we found short-form content is more 'attentionally efficient'. A 2022 dentsu study on the impact of various ad lengths found that shorter ads were able to drive higher recall and choice uplift from the same number of seconds of viewing time compared to longer ads.”

Adding short-form video to your media mix

The success of campaigns increasingly depends on an effective cross-channel strategy. Short-form video delivers a priming effect on other channels, driving brand recognition, recall and sales across the full funnel. 

A 2018 study by Kargo and MediaScience found that combining TV ads, 30-second social ads, and even shorter social ads (in this instance, six seconds) produced a far greater uptick in brand recall than each ad in isolation. 

“Short-form video is already driving success for marketers across the entire marketing funnel, so you should be seeing short-form video as a powerful medium across the marketing mix,” says Boger. An example of this can be seen by PureGym, who won TikTok Ad Awards’ Greatest Performance award by adopting a nurturing strategy across the funnel.

Relevance is also key. To successfully tailor creative to each platform, brands must consider the creative rules of the platforms they're showing up in, and create ads that are relevant and authentic to the platform. A 2023 CreativeX study found that 55% of media spend was allocated to sub-optimal creatives which did not adhere to the platform’s creative best practices, which results in losses equating to $233.4bn. TikTok's own research found that 60% of users surveyed said they are more likely to purchase after viewing TikTok-first content.

But, brands that have small resources and restrictive budgets may find this challenging. “At TikTok, we offer multiple creative solutions to support advertisers who may need help creating their own assets, or working with partners who are already creative experts on the platform,” says Boger. “And, of course, no one knows the platform better than creators themselves, they're a surefire way to ensure your brand's content meets the expectations of content found on the platform. Our TikTok Creator Marketplace helps to pair brands directly with creators and respond to briefs.”

Three steps to success 

Not sure how to get started with short-form video on TikTok? Here are three essential steps to launching standout, authentic campaigns that captivate TikTok communities and drive results. 

1. Understand the platform: If you’re not already familiar with TikTok, have a play around on the platform. See what’s popular with its communities, search for your products, explore popular trends. Get a feel for how your brand can authentically fit in. 

2. Avoid historic mistakes: Make sure you’re not over-reliant on last-click-based measurement. Instead, explore the important role other channels play in the lead-up to a conversion. TikTok has tools that will help you understand if a specific ad, campaign or a channel caused an uplift in sales or had any other incremental impact. 

3. Measurement: Embrace a measurement approach that delivers true insight into short-form video impact. Capture a variety of audience signals with secure data connections, leverage incrementality testing and compare cross-channel performance through measurement tools such as multi-touch attribution or media-mix modelling. 

“If marketers continue to iterate their measurement approach and calibrate regularly, they can be confident of being as close as possible to an optimal media strategy,” says Boger.

Explore more insights and actionable steps in TikTok’s white paper in partnership with WARC ‘Short-form video: How to supercharge your media mix and drive full-funnel impact’. Download here.