Hot Then Not

Everything was going great in high school until that new guy showed up.

Let’s call him Fabio.

Fabio was tall, wore the coolest jeans, but what really did it was his hair.

Fabio had long hair and it was driving all the girls to distraction. All they could talk about was Fabio’s hair.

In the halls they were always staring at Fabio.

Fabio was hot.

It goes without saying that all the other guys in school were feeling - let’s just say: under-appreciated.

So what did they do? One by one they all started to grow their hair long.

Even that guy with curly hair. He was the only guy with curly hair. He had to grow it twice as long because it took twice as much to look long.

Now he just looked like everyone else.

Then it happened.

One day Fabio showed up to school with short hair.

Now short hair was hot.

The other guys were now thinking: ‘Damn, I just spent all this time growing my hair out. I used to have short hair! What was I thinking?’

Well, that’s what’s happening in social media right now:

Fabio is TikTok.

Long hair is short-form video.

And the curly haired guy is Instagram.

TikTok recently announced they are going to be accepting 10 minute videos soon

....and everyone else is still deeeep into growing their hair long.

In fact Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram just announced to accountholders that Reels weren’t going to replace photos. He said Instagram is ‘still’ committed to photography.

Even though it certainly doesn’t look like that to anyone paying attention.

The moral of the story is that one minute what is hot, the next minute will very likely be not.

So it’s usually best to hold on to your core competency.

I’m not saying short-form video is going away. It’s not.

But when everyone starts looking just like Fabio...something is bound to change.

To Win Big, Think Small

“Alice in Wonderland-like” syndrome is a disorder of the brain. The symptoms are named after Lewis Carroll’s protagonist Alice, who went down a rabbit hole and found herself shrinking or expanding depending on her circumstances. People who are afflicted by it misperceive the size and distance of objects, seeing them as larger or smaller than their natural state. 

In a white paper, comScore has reported that a staggering 80% of social media viewing is done on mobile devices. How do people choose what to consume? They click on thumbnails that jump out at them. So not only are viewers encountering content at a tiny scale, they are choosing what to click from even tinier thumbnail images.

When designing artwork for social media, for Facebook, for YouTube, you have to zoom way out.  When people view your post, your thumbnail may be as small as 3/4 of an inch wide. If your designs have lots of copy, small font sizes or detailed imagery, people are going to get frustrated and scroll right past them. Opportunity lost.

But when people click your thumbnail, you get traffic. When you get traffic, you win. To win big, you have to start by thinking small.

Video Is The New Black

When I was 11, I filmed an epic disaster movie in my basement on a Super 8mm camera. It was called “Ball!”, and told the story of a Godzilla-sized Nerf basketball that destroyed an entire town, which consisted of my slot car race track, HO gauge train set and a lot of plastic army men. I used a lot of lighter fluid. Let’s just say it’s a good thing there weren’t smoke detectors in those days.

At the time, my friends and I were drawing lots of robots and war scenes on paper and sharing them with each other. Needless to say the screening of “Ball!” for my buds put me in a class of my own in the storytelling department. Because my story was moving.

It's estimated that 80% of all content consumed on the web will be video by 2020. Gulp. Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Instagram and their mother are now starting to stream original programming. Not happy with being merely platforms, they are jumping into being content creators.

Video is the new black. The nice-to-have is now a requirement to remain competitive. For the entrepreneur, brand owner or creative professional the important question is: Are you moving yet?

photo credit: Philip VanDusen