Today Now This News, the social mobile video startup with stellar backers and advisors, has been breaking new ground by introducing Instagrams’ 15 seconds breaking news videos collected by users and reporters all over the world.
On their first day they caught a truck on fire in front of the Flatiron building. Definitely not major news, but it certainly made some decent footage.
The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced that in the long term this will be a winning formula and the shape of news to come. Let’s consider the main trends in news production for the Information Society:
- faster
- shorter
- simpler
- more diffused
There will be adjustments of format, channels, but for competitive production and distribution of breaking news crowd-sourcing is the way to go.
Instagram introduced videos just over a month ago opening a pandora box of opportunities for users as well as brand. As users have already shown a preference for watching videos untethered, the potential for marketers is huge: from animated banners to product shots the possibilities are endless for short, relevant (that’s always a keyword for mobile audiences) videos.
So I did a quick search to see what those creative Instagrammers have already started to produce with video.
The first one I find is videomeals: super quick videorecipes, this guy is definitely on to something…
UK fashion brands like Burberry and Top Shop seem to have been the first to jump on the ultra short video wagon. This videogram by Top Shop has all the right ingredients: cool music, fashion outfit combinations and of course all the proper hashtags and product codes to buy the items online:
The reason I think that they will be hugely successful with brands and users is that they are so short that is difficult to get boring and if they’re bad you can just quickly switch to the next.