The head of brand partnerships at ATTN: shares expertise from creating some of the internet’s most shared branded videos.
All content creators know that publishing great work is oncly half the battle. The real challenge is getting people to consume and share your content with their networks.
Taryn Crouthers and her team at ATTN: are experts when it comes to creating shareable videos. Both their editorial and branded content regularly racks up millions of views and the latter consistently ranks among the top branded videos across all of Facebook thanks to widespread social sharing.
As head of their Brand Partnerships team, she understands that getting audiences to hit the share button can be challenging because sharing is so personal. “When they share our videos, our audience is proudly declaring something about themselves, their beliefs, or their lifestyles,” she explained in an interview with Pressboard.
Recently, a video her team produced in partnership with Match.com was the number one branded video on Facebook, as ranked on Brandtale, getting over 11.7 million views by being shared by almost 100K people!
These results demonstrate the power of creating shareable videos, so to help other content creators and marketers hone their branded video skills, we interviewed Taryn and asked her to share some advice.
The following interview contains excerpts from The Epic Guide To Branded Video – 50 pages of free advice from the experts at The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Mashable, American Express and more!
Pressboard: What’s your role, your background, and what attracted you to the branded video space?
Taryn: I lead ATTN:’s brand partnerships team and am excited about the opportunity to work with brands to join the social conversation around issues that matter. I have been in media for my entire career, with great companies like AMC Networks and A+E Networks. But my passion for branded video comes from my family. My parents are artists who owned a commercial photography studio and I grew up surrounded by art directors, brands and advertising. I transitioned to ATTN: because social video is the present and future and an exciting medium for brands to have conversations with consumers. There is nothing more thrilling than seeing those conversations go viral.
Good content inspires praise, but great content stirs up such deep emotion that it moves people to share it.
Pressboard: Your team has had a lot of success packaging big, complex topics into short videos. What is it about this approach to video content that makes it so shareable?
Taryn: Our mission at ATTN: is to tell stories that are worth your attention. Many of these stories are centered around issues people are most passionate about, across education, social justice, politics, parenting, and the environment. We use conversational language to create a singular argument around each issue, with a distinctive point of view. When they share our videos, our audience is proudly declaring something about themselves, their beliefs, or their lifestyles.
Is there an ideal video length that you find performs best on various platforms?
It depends on the medium — at ATTN:, we program our content for the platform where our audience is consuming. That said, we generally find the most concise arguments perform best. For instance, our Facebook videos have some of the highest engagement metrics on the platform (we average around 50,000 engagements per video on Facebook, according to Tubular Labs), and our Insights team has found that 60-90 seconds is an ideal length there.
In your experience, which of the following is the greatest challenge with creating video content?
Since social branded video is in its infancy, there is not yet a standard currency for measuring success. Many use CPM (cost per mille), CPV (cost per view) and CPE (cost per engagement) as benchmarks, but these metrics do not always take the purpose of branded content into account. And all views are not created equal.
As an example, our views per video and engagements per video are some of the highest in the industry, but we have never paid to promote any of our video content on social. This is rare, as most publishers use a combination of organic viewership and paid distribution. Because our audience discovers our content organically, we have established premium value and trust. We give brands the opportunity to borrow that trust, and they are seeing the results. In the month of August, we created 3 of the top 20 branded videos across all publishers, as tracked by Brandtale Leaderboard. Like our editorial content, these branded videos were all 100% organic.
Social video is the present and future and an exciting medium for brands to have conversations with consumers.
What’s the one trait you believe is most common among great brand video marketers?
As consumers, we are bombarded with more media and messaging than ever before. The best video marketers know how to edit themselves. Simplicity and brevity is the hardest thing to achieve, but the most important. When a consumer sees your content, there should be one clear takeaway.
In 100 characters or less, what is your favorite tip for creating great video content?
Good content inspires praise, but great content stirs up such deep emotion that it moves people to share it.
Pressboard would like to thank Taryn Crouthers and ATTN: for speaking with us and contributing to our latest eBook, The Epic Guide To Branded Video.