With Vine and Instagram’s growing popularity, the social media landscape is becoming littered with “micro-moments.” What does this mean for the digital advertising that is sure to follow?
This past Fourth of July, I expected a few things that every
great American holiday should possess: fireworks, food with friends and a lot
of 6 to 15 second videos on Vine & Instagram.
It is clear that we now live in a world of micro-moments.
And in anticipation of that, not only have I thought about what to capture with
photographs, but with a video as well. With the development of video-sharing
platforms, we can capture those micro-moments better than ever before: with
sound, with emotion and with the ability to broadcast it to the entire world.
We can be the star of our own movie, the feature in our own commercial – and we
can filter it with rose colored glasses – which can be a bit dangerous as Meredith
Fineman detailed recently over at Fast Company.
These days when you look around it feels like mobile phones
are becoming portals into all of our souls. Now that we’ve combined the two
most powerful elements of the future of information technology into one – video
+ mobile – the question becomes: what next? How will this impact the future of
presidential campaigns, breaking news, human psychology? Being able to record
that pop, crackle and snap of the fireworks over the Washington Monument or the
sound of the crowd as it sings along with a concert – we can do more than just
remember a memory, we can record it, share it and edit it to our liking.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what
is a micro-video worth? Only time can tell. Soon we will know exactly how much
a 15-second Instagram video costs in terms of impressions, clicks and
engagement. Venture
Beat reported that Instagram video was not created just for the sake of
keeping up with Vine, but for the future of Facebook and Instagram’s
advertising model. Venture Beat rightly points out that a 15-second video fits
right into the pre-roll ad model. In digital advertising land, we have seen the
power of pre-roll video on YouTube in terms of being able to persuade and
engage users to vote, take action and believe in a candidate or brand. Once
again, we see content
collide with commercial usage and the rules change all over again.
But when our lives can be organized by hashtags, filtered
through 15-second videos and expressed in 42 emoticons on Facebook, the
question then becomes: whose commercial are you watching? Sometimes the
advertisement might be of you. And that may be the one thing we need to think
more about as we slide into the new realm of social media video sharing: how to
stay authentic and not just pose for the camera.
