Commentary

Nokia's Smart Less-Will-Get-You-More Video Strategy

Arguments about the most effective length for digital video ads and consumer tolerance for ad-to-content ratios have been going on for as long as I have been organizing panels of agency creatives complaining about the need for discrete online spots. And that is a long time, my friends. I never understood why more marketers weren't experimenting with the various combinations of creative, frequency and length digital video allowed. In my experience being on the receiving end of countless multimedia ads (to which I am paid to pay attention, by the way) the ones that stick in my memory are not just the spots that showed sheer creative verve, but the once that played with the other dimensions available to planners.

One example of this brevity+frequency+variety=memorability equation was a smart mobile video pre-roll series Microsoft used when rolling out Windows 7. They announced themselves as 7-second spots, each of which flashed a single new task made possible by the operating system. They were cute and varied, rotating in front of the next video spots from among five or six different small creative treatments. They worked. I recall them to this day as good product and branding ads.

A different spin on this approach comes from Nokia, which is climbing the viral video charts with a series called Nokia N9 Seconds: The Worlds Quickest Ad promoting the N9 handset. Each 9-second piece is a rapidly cut montage of clips that express one of the key features: swipe, browse, social media, maps, camera, all-screen design. Each ad makes good on the quick ad promise, and it fills those seconds with indirect references to the topic at hand. In each montage we only get a second or so of the N9 actually pictured performing the feature, but it is in this richer context that the phone begins to feel like another person who is swiping, browsing, finding, etc. You may not get a good sense of the phone itself, but the brand associations are positive.

What is just as cool about the series is that the nine-second bits are linked. The first nine seconds of the 20-second spot are the meat of the montage. But each one ends with an invitation to take another nibble and advance to the next ad. Nokia has already made good on its promise to take up only nine seconds of your time, so the barrier to watching another is low, Still if the YouTube view counts are a rough measure the first video in the series "Swipe" got all the love, with 2.2 million views. The second video loses much of that audience, dropping to 138,000 views, but the rest hover around the 100,000 mark. And the ads reiterate some images from the previous spots, creating at least some sort of visual coherence among them all. 

Indirectness is not always the best strategy for any ad. Forcing the viewer to make the necessary connections to make sense of an ad presumes an audience that probably cares more than they really do about helping the marketer make their meaning. But in this case the brevity of the spots themselves work to the campaign's advantage. The investment is small, the connections between visuals and the ads' point are about as minor and attainable as matching three jewels in a casual puzzle game. Perhaps a bit more intrigue or foreshadowing of an ongoing tale worth pursuing would have helped retain audience interest across more of the spots. Perhaps this particular series needs more of a storyline than just a clever concept to maintain interest. Nevertheless the idea of parsing a video ad campaign into sequential or smaller bits that the user might encounter at once or frequently across the Web is fascinating. It reminds us that the unique technologies of digital network advertising offer dimensions of user experience we barely have begun exploring.  
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