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Apple confounds conventional wisdom around ever-shorter video ads

By our News Team | 2022

Tech giant releases a new video ad that is almost nine minutes long. And it’s attracting close to a million views a day on YouTube.

How long should a video-based advertisement be? One minute seems too long in these days of consumers’ short attention spans.

Thirty seconds then? Perhaps. Fifteen seconds? Seems right, but can it get the marketing message across.

Apple, a brand that is known for doing things a little differently, has gone in the opposite direction and recently debuted a video ad that comes in at just under nine minutes in length.

And, bucking all the conventional wisdom that suggests today’s consumers have an attention span of seconds rather than minutes, it has attracted 11-million views in only 12 days on YouTube. In other words, not far short of a million new views a day.

A scene from the new nine-minute Apple video advertisement. Photo credit: Apple via YouTube

Latest in a trilogy of not-so-short videos

The latest Apple video ad is part of a trilogy called The Underdogs, with the first two versions released in 2019 and 2020. These, however, were shorter at three minutes and almost seven minutes respectively.

All are mini stories in their own right, but use their fun storylines to showcase a range of Apple products that can be used in everyday business or home life. Each story follows four downtrodden and nurdy workers at a packaging design company who are constantly at odds with their bullying and demanding boss.

The latest ad shows our four anti-heroes deciding that they’ve had enough and opting to join the post-Covid Great Resignation that is permeating much of the developed world.

For marketers and their agencies, the ad’s success seems to indicate that remarkably long video can, indeed, captivate consumers, who will actively seek out and spend time watching something with an entertaining storyline – as opposed to allowing 15-second or 30-second ads to run in the background while they’re grabbing a cup of coffee or dashing to the loo.

You can watch the latest Apple ad here.

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