The long and short of it: Reaching the right audience at the right time with versatile video formats

Viewers want the best of both worlds

 

Long-form and short-form videos are not David and Goliath, but yin and yang — which is to say they don’t compete with each other, but complement one another. Shorts presents viewers with snackable content that’s easy to watch and share, making it a prime vehicle for discovery. But post-discovery, our data shows that viewers turn to long-form content for further information, expert insights, and deep immersion.

 

This appetite for both long- and short-form is consistent across age groups, including Gen Z. According to our study with Material, 96% of Southeast Asian Gen Zs said they watch both short and long content on YouTube. 

 

YouTube’s versatility gives marketers a platform to reach consumers in the discovery-to-action mindset, with 60% of surveyed respondents in Southeast Asia saying that Shorts helps them decide what to purchase, 20 points higher than the competitive average.

 

Short clips, long payoff

 

So how do you leverage your Shorts addition to make a splash? We spent a year analysing ads from leading brands so we could codify creative best practices for Shorts and add them to our ABCDs of effective video ads. In the process, we learnt that the top-performing Shorts ads are unlike other ads on YouTube — so no, they are not just cutdowns of your hero ads. 

^Sources:

^{1 Google/Material, Power of YouTube Shorts, SEA (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand), 2024, n=1,806, Ages 13-54, Field Dates: 11/7/23 - 11/22/23}

^{2 Google/ThatFigTree - Why YouTube Matters to APAC Consumers}

^{3 MediaScience, The Power of Adjacency Study, United States, Feb ‘24.}