• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 3, 2013

I have a hard time believing that Vine does much for business in six seconds. I’m not saying it couldn’t. It could happen You also could print a best-selling book on piece of origami, maybe, but it would seem you should weigh the effort versus the payoff.

Maybe I’m wrong. A given is that in the overall Greater Online Videoland, no one has a very good map, so my doubt, if proved wrong, doesn’t mean much more than your optimism, right now.  

At this point, we’re just talking. Twitter’s Vine is only four months old, hardly enough to time to confer failure or phenom status. Still, I think in the world of advertising, Vine is mostly a parlor game.          

But to give you a more positive view is Lou Perseghin, client service manager for the social media marketing agency Chatterblast, based in Philadelphia, who I think make a fine distinction about Vine’s use as an ad vehicle.

In short, he told KYW Radio, the Philadelphia all-news station. “Vine really showcases a brand’s creativity, more so than their products, whereas with many other mediums you have a great picture but because motion and sound are incorporated you have to be a little more in-depth with it.”

In that way, then Vine is an ad venue for brands only attempting to create an image. By that token, J.C. Penney, in its 30-second foray into rebranding itself (leading to the current un-rebranding) could have used Vine to create the buzz that said, “Look, we’ve changed,” without delving in the things about the change its most loyal customers didn’t like. But that’s not a great example: I’m broadly generating, but I don’t think Vine is relying on Penney’s subscribers to stay in business.  

“You want to create some type of ongoing narrative with Vine,” Perseghin told the radio station.  “You want people to keep coming back and looking at your account because you have recurring characters or recurring themes or consistent style.”

It’s a flavor of the month that, out on Main Street, I think still has way to go, but there’s ample evidence it’s gone pretty far already Last month Unruly released a study timed to coincide with Vine’s first 100 days that analyzed 10 million Vines over the course of a month.

“What the stats show, generally, is that Vine is growing, fittingly enough, like kudzu,” wrote my colleague Catharine A. Taylor, who noted that five Vine tweets are sent every second and that “what  I’ll call Vine-o-mercials are shared four times more than other ads.”

Still, I’m unconvinced that all or even most sharing leads to buying anything being sold.  I’m not sure that  good vibes toward a product Vines engenders  means a lot either, or that short is better, or that a little six second video does anything more than something  that may lead the viewer to say something like, “Isn’t that clever!” That’s kind of a six-second  so-what? in my booklet.

pj@mediapost.com