A quarterly magazine about video marketing — YouTube, TikTok, Reels, CTV, and the slow craft of moving pictures for commercial purpose. For teams who suspect that shipping more videos may not, on any honest read of the last three years, be the answer.
The industry's default advice for the last five years has been to ship more short-form video, more often, in more formats. On the data we have from 91 brands over the last three years, that advice has stopped producing the outcomes that made it worth giving. Which means most video functions are, whether they know it or not, running a programme that is losing money per video shipped.
A UK consumer subscription brand commissioned a specific YouTube documentary series in early 2024. Two years on, the twelve videos are still driving new subscriptions. The commissioning brief, the production economics, the compounding.
Rather than briefing external creators, a mid-market skincare brand built a small in-house studio. Six people, 400+ TikTok videos a year, no paid amplification. The production model, and its unglamorous constraints.
An outdoor brand tested fifteen edited versions of a single hero commercial across CTV inventory. The eleventh version was the point at which the audience response collapsed. What the drop revealed about creative fatigue.
Every video-strategy deck for the last decade has cited the three-second hook as a compulsory design element. The three-second attention model was, on its origin, weakly evidenced. Its persistence has produced a generation of videos that look identically desperate to keep you watching.
Nine years of commissioning has taught us that most brand videos fail on the audio track. The visual production is competent, the writing is passable, the sound design is treated as an afterthought. The audience notices.
The head of video at a UK financial-services company runs her programme on a metric almost none of her peers report. Why she cares less about first-watch performance and more about the retention curve past the commercial ask.
A UK-based commercial director whose work runs on YouTube, CTV, and cinema explains why she has, since 2022, declined every vertical-video commission. The reasoning is craft-specific and worth an hour of your quarter.
One video from the previous month worth stopping to consider. One craft argument. One recommendation drawn from a client audit. Free. No tracking. Unsubscribe is one click and takes effect immediately.