In this episode of About That, Carl Mayer speaks to Tess Erickson, Director of Strategy and Research at Involved Media, about the agency’s Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report on Connected Video and Short-Form Video.
For the Connected Video results and webinar, view here.
For the Short-Form Video results and webinar, view here.
About Tess Erickson:
Tess Erickson is a research professional dedicated to understanding what drives consumer behavior, from the first spark of interest to the final purchase and beyond. As Director of Strategy and Research at Involved Media, Tess conducts proprietary research focused on filling in the knowledge gaps about the modern media consumer as well as creating and re-evaluating media strategies for new and existing clients. Prior to focusing on media, Tess worked in market research at Ipsos and previously attended NYU, concentrating in the biological basis of economic decision-making.
Transcript:
Carl Mayer: Welcome to About That. I’m Carl Mayer, joined once again by Tess Erickson, the Director of Strategy and Research at Involved Media. Tess, thank you for being here.
Tess Erickson: Thank you for having me, Carl.
CM: Well, we’re in your offices, so thank you for having me. In addition to everything she does at Involved, Tess heads up the Connected Audience study and recently they finished off Wave 2 of their study. The first one was connected audio; this one was a short-form video. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
To start things off, first of all, I think we all kind of know we get a sense of what short is and what long is, but as a definition, what is short-form video?
TE: Yeah, absolutely. In general, we talked about short-form video being under two minutes long and long form being over two minutes long. But where we actually define short form is what platform people are viewing the video on. So even the difference between YouTube Shorts versus regular YouTube, the idea that 2-minute video that’s posted on regular YouTube versus YouTube Shorts is a little bit functionally different.
CM: So it’s really not just the length, it’s really the format and the platform.
TE: Yeah, absolutely. It’s that vertical video that we’re now used to. And it’s specifically that swipe-through effect that all of the short-form apps have taken on, as opposed to, again, maybe a more traditional YouTube experience where you’re seeing a video and clicking on it.
Short-form as of now is much more dedicated to that swipe-through environment.
CM: One thing that your research bore out that I think we all anecdotally knew to be true is, you know, some of the demo stuff like Facebook skews older, TikTok skews younger. Within that, what did you find in there that surprised you?
TE: Yeah, I, I totally agree. The age stuff, not necessarily too surprising there. But what I did find surprising was actually the gender skews that we saw. I had some previous notion that YouTube is a little more male than the other platforms, but wasn’t expecting for it to have 10% more reach with men than with women.
And then on the opposite side, I hadn’t realized that TikTok had so much more reach with women than with men. And finally, I didn’t think that Instagram was going to be the platform that was most equal between genders. That certainly Instagram tends to seem like it is maybe more woman-focused, but we saw that reach was the most similar.
The other thing I thought was interesting was parents. We don’t necessarily think about having a kid as being the thing that might introduce you to short-form content and that you definitely are different generations. But we certainly saw that parents follow their kids onto these platforms and are even engaging with other parents on the platform as well.
CM: So I mentioned that this was wave 2 that you just completed. Between waves one and two, you did see some sort of significant changes in Ad exposure.
TE: Yeah, what we saw, the main piece of our study is about streaming video and that includes long-form video. So what we saw the biggest change in was in ad supported SVOD videos.
So what we see there is that in our first wave ad supported SVODs and ad free SVOD, that watch time was about the same. In our second wave of the study, we saw that ad supported viewing of SVOD content had drastically outpaced ad free viewing. We are seeing a lot more of these ad opportunities pop up across channel and that does then speak to short form as well where we see this really notable daily ad supported audience that is reachable and especially that younger ad supported audience that isn’t necessarily reachable on linear or even SVOD content.
CM: With the ads in short-form video, how do they differ, I guess, on one end from the user experience? How does that differ from long-form and also just from the data that can be gleaned by the platform?
TE: Sure. I mean, the big difference in how people watch short-form versus long form is the way they engage with short-form versus long-form.
We mentioned it earlier, but even the swipe through that you get on short-form is really informative that you’re, you’re in some ways choosing over 60 videos an hour on short-form and all of that data is part of what then that platform knows about you.
But that also is there are also so many other ways people engage with short-form video that gives us information that we don’t see in long-form content. Things like liking videos, sharing videos, and that clickthrough to even direct buying are all things that are informative to advertisers on short-form and change the way that consumers are engaging with ads on short-form.
CM: Now I want to get more into the direct buying because that sort of bottom of the funnel purchasing, I don’t know why it surprised me that it happened so much, but it did. There’s a lot of purchasing that happens on the platforms. And what does that tell us about just even just the trust that people have?
TE: Well, I think one big thing we saw is that people under 45 are much more likely to be doing direct purchasing through these platforms and people over 45. So there’s a real age break in terms of trust and when with commerce on the short-form platforms that younger people have a lot more trust or much more used to not only e-commerce, in general, but specifically mobile e-commerce that they’re much more likely to be comfortable purchasing through on their phone. But specifically now through these direct TikTok shop or Instagram shop links.
CM: So with all the information, which there’s a ton of it to go through, we’ve barely kind of scratched the surface here. But if you had to boil it down to something that advertisers or marketers could really act upon and put to use., What would that be?
TE: Sure. I mean, I know everyone hates the year, but it does depend on the advertiser. I think overall, we know that there’s a younger audience there that is reachable. We know these different gender skews that the platforms have. And so that’s an important takeaway in general.
But what I think is really dependent on the client is which products do really well on these platforms versus ones where people are more hesitant to be influenced by content or even especially purchased directly on those platforms. So those more aesthetic purchases like clothing, beauty, skin care, these are things that do well on these platforms. And specifically people are willing to buy directly through these platforms.
Whereas I wouldn’t say that these platforms aren’t a place to advertise furniture or insurance or anything and that they are really influential. But the strategy that you need to have around these being places for people to become informed rather than necessarily direct clickthrough purchase purchases is a big difference in the way that we would inform a different advertisers’ strategies.
CM: So it’s still good for awareness building for off-platform purchases, but nobody’s going to, you know, buy a term life policy without any research just because TikTok told them.
TE: And I don’t think TikTok shop wants that either.
CM: Nobody needs that. All right, so this was wave 2. You know, I take a day to just relax and take a breath afterward. But the day after tomorrow, what’s next?
TE: Sure. So we have the next wave of this study coming up at the beginning of next year. But even sooner than that we have a study going into field about sports viewership. We know how valuable live sports viewership is at this point. It’s the one type of content that isn’t really evergreen that is that does require that on demand viewership and that has differentiated itself in terms of how interested advertisers are in getting on those broadcasts. So that’s what we’ll be looking at next and and hopefully presenting that as well.
CM: And when those are done, I hope you come back on the show and tell us all about it. It’s always super fascinating. Thank you very much for being here.
TE: Thanks, Carl, and see you again.
CM: And thank you for watching About That. Like I said, we only scratch the surface here. I urge you to check out the webinars that Tess has hosted on these topics: connected audio, long-form, short-form.
And thank you once again, Tess Erickson, Director of Strategy and Research at Involved Media.
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