SIDEQUESTIONS

Yes, up there in the side row, the question for the group was “Is there a Moore’s Law for social video growth?” Well, the never-ending quest for ways to stick your content continues unabated that’s for sure. In the past decade, we’ve gone from NINE primary video creative share modes, to FOURTY-NINE, and there’s a few I’ve left out (like livestream shopping and virtual reality).

From Al Ries and Jack Trout’s “Immutable Laws Of Marketing” Rule #10 Diversion and #12 Extension, any popular medium tends towards complexity so I guess this is to be expected but jeepers that’s a lot of video content varieties to track!

The acceleration of mobile use during the pandemic was a particularly robust driver of video creative innovation (er… replication), with the TikTok rocket spurring all sorts of new competitive tricks from the other platforms – Reels! Stories! Shorts! Collabs! Spotlights! Fleets!

Glancing further back, there was a fleeting moment in mid 2007 where we could have had a wonderfully simple future. TV had reached that tipping point when there were enough flatscreens in people’s homes to fully transition to native 16×9 for broadcast and those same standard formats were ported elegantly to VOD and Facebook and Youtube.

The 4×3 days were so close to being behind us, but then the blasted vertical handheld super computers with their glass capacitive touch screens and their in-feed scrolling real estate responsive layouts put us all right back in the assorted mixed dimensions video nightmare.

And then the better camera phones and Snapchat apps came in to finish wrecking any hope of a singular wide rectangle shape being that mythical one-size-fits-all video strategy for everybody. 

So close and yet so far away.

The Glove and Boots puppets tried to save us with their Vertical Video Syndrome PSA, but we didn’t listen. Of these 47 social flavors, only Youtube and Vimeo favor 16×9, and even the former has started to cave with their stories and community tab products.

It’s not a simple square peg in a square hole either. Now we’re in a place where every one of these platforms and products have their own format quirks, dimensions (1080×1350 just for fun!?), styles, sensibilities, and best practices.

It seems that it’s all a vertical drop all the way down now with no end in sight…so maybe start thinking about your resurrected Vine strategy or maybe hold out hope that intelligent robots or generative AIs save us, or perhaps foldable phones or augmented reality and The Metaverse™ will simplify this or… make it infinitely worse.

Whatever way, shape, or form, the industry is gonna need a lot more social media managers and editors and graphics design power to craft and version and tag and optimize all this $#!t out properly.

Here’s a PDF version of the chart for 2022: