One of the most fascinating and yet hardly discussed dynamics in marketing today is how incredibly low video watch times are online.
Social media based video (across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube…) has become the largest communications channel in the world in terms of total watch time and yet, across nearly every major advertiser we speak to, the average watch time for paid ads on these platforms is just 1 to 2 seconds.
Billions are being spent on video ads that are being watched for the time it takes to blink. These are more like ad impressions than video views. It’s simply how long it takes the viewer to realise, “This is an ad,” and then scroll past.
These video ads are being counted but they aren’t being watched.
Great advertising isn’t just about flashing a logo, its objective is to be noticed, to hold attention long enough to land ideas and messages and hopefully to sell.
If you want to truly succeed in this space you need to:
1. Get much longer view durations like +10 seconds
2. Feature the brand prominently in those seconds
3. Land the marketing message before the average watch time of the video is reached.
If you can nail those three things, everything changes, this becomes, in my view the most effective kind of scale communication in the world today.
Real earned attention with the messages the brand cares about landing in the minds of the precise audiences that matter.
When you extend audience watch time, it fundamentally changes how we can think about video views. In much of the data side of the media industry, a view is treated like a digital impression, each one counted equally, regardless of quality. But if viewers are watching longer, we can move beyond just counting views.
We can analyse what’s actually happening inside the view, second by second to understand brand visibility and message retention. Even better, we can optimise based on whether the message is being heard and the brand is being remembered.
Meta + TikTok + Google revenues in 2024 were in excess of $500bn which is roughly half of all global ad spend.
If your brand is contributing to these revenues, the best measure of the quality of your video marketing spend is average watch times + brand presence + messaging and if you land all three, it’s no longer just media spend — it’s a high-performance engine for brand growth. And almost no one is doing it properly.