Author: Fan Ying, title map from: vision china.
With the rise of "Tik Tok" and "Aauto Quicker", people spend more and more time on short video platforms. About 15 seconds to 1 minute, one novel and interesting content after another stimulates dopamine in our body, making short videos the best choice for many young people to spend their scattered time.
Some people assert that short videos are "killing" long videos.
Is this really the case?
Recently, Wang Yizhi, a partner of Fanying, made a live sharing activity with the theme of "How to build a video content judgment standard by saying" long "and" short ". In this sharing, he put forward a series of vivid and interesting views on the development and relationship between long and short video content, and shared his thoughts and attempts on the "video content judgment standard" for content developers by combing the development of mature markets.
The following are the highlights of this sharing:
Short video: Am I killing the long video?
Short entertainment content is the mainstream of consumption.
In fact, the entertainment content with relative length has always existed in people’s lives. For example, in the non-video era, people usually like to read tabloids, which consumes less time and has a lower reading threshold than novels. Compared with the cost of watching singing in the theater, people are more willing to go to the roadside to watch the performances of jugglers.
In the video age, with the popularity of home videos fading away, it is becoming more and more normal for people to brush short videos between buses, subways or meals than to spend money and time going to the cinema.
So how do we define long and short videos?
In fact, for most audiences, the boundary between long and short videos is not so clear. Even in the industry, the difference between a short video platform and a long video platform is not clearly defined.
How to distinguish between long and short videos depends more on the service provided by the video content. In most people’s understanding, long videos have complete information, such as movies, TV shows, variety shows and so on. The short video, in the public’s cognition, will be news, advertisements or instant entertainment information represented by Tik Tok. From this perspective, we understand that smaller and shorter content will have lower threshold and stronger popularity at the level of entertainment content.
In fact, from the beginning of the cinema era, long and short videos have always complemented each other and developed together. In the 1930s, most of the short content such as newsreels, animations and short stories were broadcast in European and American cinemas, instead of long movies. In the TV era, for a long time, the TV platform played mainly short content. With the expansion of the audience and the reduction of production costs, we saw TV dramas and movies on TV.
Therefore, it is not short video that squeezes the space of long video, but short content has been the mainstream of mass entertainment consumption for a long time, while long video is the upgrade of consumption and experience.
Network: the main position of video consumption
Video consumption needs to be distinguished according to the scene and terminal when the audience consumes.
However, with the popularity of mobile portable devices, the Internet is everywhere, and even cinema viewing is inseparable from the Internet. To some extent, we can say that the terminals where viewers consume videos today can be regarded as "Internet terminals". So what makes the difference? Scene.
If we divide the consumption scenes of the audience, it can be said that "indoor" and "outdoor" are more applicable. Because of the different consumption scenes, the audience’s behavior of consuming videos will also be different. For example, when the audience’s consumption scene is indoors, even if we have a mobile phone, we may choose to use smart TV to consume videos.
The main consumption place of fragmented information is completed in the process of moving, while inconvenient public space needs to create a sense of ritual, such as the lighting atmosphere of the theater and the requirement of mute the audience’s mobile phone, which can help consumers access their computers more efficiently.
From the comparison between the annual movie box office growth in China and the increase in the number of Internet and mobile phone users, it can be seen that although the total box office in China has been climbing, the people who go to the cinema to see movies still account for only a small part of the number of netizens.
Although there are a lot of free content on the Internet, the attention economy brought by the huge netizens is very considerable, which is unmatched by cinema consumers.
Therefore, the main consumption position of entertainment content is still on the Internet.
Short video: a trial of long video
The symbiotic relationship between long and short videos is also worthy of attention.
On the short video platform, there are three kinds of content with relatively large traffic, namely, social politics, entertainment and sports, and film and television. Among them, film and television is the most likely and easiest to lead to the transformation of long video content. The short video platform has gradually become the core traffic source of the long video platform.
Watching a long video is time-consuming. When the audience chooses whether to watch a long video, it is usually through a short video.(preview)To judge. Therefore, short videos are sometimes more like "samples" of long videos.
Short video is the main way for us to get any information, while long video is the way to get more information in depth.
In the short video ecosystem, the functionality of different video content is very clear. Long video can bring better immersion and more complete harvest to the audience on the basis of this function.
Generally speaking, short videos drive the consumption of long videos to a certain extent. There is no tension between short video and long video. They have a close relationship of symbiotic development and mutual promotion.
Short video is more widely spread, but the "liquidity" of long video is still irreplaceable by short video, and its "long tail effect" is also beyond the reach of short video in the short term. Therefore, for the content industry, the marketing of short video can help create higher highs and bring more long-term benefits in the operation of the whole film during the initial period of word-of-mouth and influence establishment.
Short video: incubating creative talents
The nationwide creation of short videos has also laid a broad content and talent base for long videos. For a long time, our talents in the field of cultural creativity are relatively limited, and the production capacity we can bring is relatively weak, so we have always had many problems in the quality of long and short videos.
Nowadays, the short video platform actually releases the participation of the whole people.
Although the tools and production technology need to be improved, this release can still bring us a lot of innovative content, and also give many people who are interested and have ideas a space to practice their hands, which will naturally bring about the trend of "a rising tide lifts all boats".
At the same time, short video is also a very good starting point for long video content, which can bring a lot of things outside the brain hole of professional screenwriters to the creators, and these things are grounded and vivid. Of course, to some extent, the short video created by the whole people has also improved the audience’s requirements for long videos.
So, how do we judge the quality of long and short video content? This involves the establishment of a content standard system. Let’s take a look at what mature markets do first.
Content standard system: reference from mature markets
Hollywood was also dominated by the creator-centered system in the 1960s and 1970s, and the situation it faced after World War II was also the lack of creators and practitioners. What broke this pattern and laid the foundation for the construction of Hollywood’s future industrial system was a film called "The Gate of Heaven".
At first, the budget of Gate of Heaven was $7.5 million, which was a very huge figure in the 1980s. Its director, Michael Simino, has just won four Oscars before making this film, which is in full swing. However, the film continued to exceed the budget during the filming process, and the final investment was as high as 44 million US dollars. But after the release, it only earned $3.5 million at the box office.
This defeat directly led to the closure of the old Hollywood production company Lianyi, and caused a huge impact on Hollywood at that time. It was also after this that Hollywood began to explore the process and standardization of film production.
Industrialization means standardization, which indicates that it can be scaled up.
The following figure shows the proportion of pure content revenue in the total revenue of three companies with relatively high Hollywood market today. We can see that in a long period of time, whether it is Sony with "hardware+entertainment", Comcast with communication, media and entertainment content as a whole, or Disney, which made a fortune by acquiring media through content to build an entire business empire, this ratio has not changed much.
Four characteristics of industrialization of content industry
Content output refers to the direct realization of content copyright itself.(excluding derivatives such as toys and amusement parks). It can be seen that in the operation of these industry giants, the production and marketing management of content have a stable standard process and scale.
On this basis, NETFLIX’s business model today has been created. Its comprehensive long video content classification standard, distribution model and recommendation mechanism are actually closely related to the industry standards established by Hollywood itself.
Looking back at the whole Hollywood system, if we want to achieve more standardization nowadays, we must first solve the production problem. The content on the short video platform actually solves the problem of production standardization and realizes the convenience of distribution and interactive communication with consumers. Therefore, it can make today’s short video content present a colorful and blooming state.
Establishing basic standards and building market ecological chain
In the industry, basic standards are divided into three categories, namely product standards, media standards and crowd standards. How to establish the industry standard of short video, we can first understand from long video.
Product standard
The basis of the whole product standard in Hollywood is type. For the audience, it is also through the type to distinguish the functions provided by the content.
Another point in product standards is difference. The essence of difference is innovation, and innovation is risky. Hollywood studios have a tent pole.（Tentpole）The concept of using a very high-cost content to prop up a "tent pole", and the rest of the investment and energy will happen around this.
Media standard
The standards at the media level are divided according to consumption frequency in the whole North American system, and different media are used to correspond to audiences with different consumption frequencies.
For example, six months before the release of a movie, the "heavy users" of the movie will be accurately advertised on a certain platform or category. For "moderate users", access to information through a wider range of channels, such as public television and cinema trailers. Finally, there are "light users", which are mainly outdoor advertisements. From "severe" to "mild", the communication atmosphere is finally formed.
Crowd standard
Based on the above two standards, the crowd standard in Hollywood is cut very finely, and we can see countless classification labels. It is precisely because of this relatively clear and stable standard that the judgment of consumers is relatively accurate, and there is basically no "dark horse" in the entire Hollywood market.
This phenomenon is not uncommon in China market. The existence of "dark horse" actually represents the strong uncertainty of the market, which is not safe for the content industry. The process of establishing standards is also the process of "eliminating dark horses".
How to establish content/product standards?
There is a general model for establishing these standards, which is to follow the two dimensions of "ornamental" and "marketability". The common understanding of "ornamental" is "good looking", while "marketability" is "good selling".
Based on these two dimensions, each content can have an evaluation standard, which is commonly said as "applauding and making a seat". This is also the core goal of every content now.
Take The Wandering Earth as an example.
In 2018, Fan Ying worked with Tencent Pictures to study the genre of China sci-fi movies. During this period, she visited the practitioners in the whole process of sci-fi movie production, conducted in-depth research from creators and audiences, sci-fi audiences and non-sci-fi audiences, and analyzed the possible future trend of China sci-fi market.
At that time, an outstanding conclusion was that the theme of disaster may be an opportunity for China’s science fiction. And The Wandering Earth’s theme is in line with this discovery. It is the story built on this basis that conforms to the values of Chinese people, which makes The Wandering Earth arouse the emotional resonance of Chinese people: "Good-looking".
At the same time, Fan Ying made three audience tests for The Wandering Earth. In the first round of testing, the biggest confusion caused by the whole film in the hearts of the audience was the contradictory relationship between Liu Peiqiang and Liu Qi. After repeated tests and three rounds of adjustment, the audience finally formed a sense of resonance with family affection, and reached the standard of "good-looking" in the hearts of the test audience.
Let’s look at the perspective of "selling well". We need to find a breakthrough point with word-of-mouth potential on ontology.
Pass the test of marketing link(Provide some information about the film, not the whole trial)To tap the audience’s interest points, the study found that it was outstanding in three levels: "special effects", "science fiction" and "story", so as to find the power point of marketing actions.
Then, how to formulate the marketing strategy of film and television content is actually very different between long and short videos. Different from the immediacy of short video, the entry threshold is low and the function is clear. Long video is a process that needs to establish a relationship with the audience at an early stage-"building questions in the audience’s mind".
Therefore, how to establish this interest point is the key in long video marketing. And this interest point is the question that the audience must enter the cinema to solve. If the output information does not arouse such curiosity in the audience’s mind, the purpose of marketing will not be achieved.
Another classic case: Titanic.
As a typical case of Fox in moderns, the biggest problem faced by its marketing team before the release was, "What should we sell?". They need to pick out the core marketing points among many elements such as epic, special effects, big director and so on.
After continuous testing, it is finally found that "the choice of two people who love each other under the background of disaster" is the best core point in both marketing level and content ontology level. So the final publicity strategy is "What happened to them?" And finally set the slogan is "nothing in the world can stop them"（Nothing on earth could come between them.）.
"Life and death choice" is the motif established in the marketing of Titanic. Long video content must find out what this motif needs to be solved.
Combined with the above cases,It is through the quality of the film itself(Good-looking)And the excavation of marketing entry point.(is it good to sell)We have established the basic criteria for judging the content.
As mentioned earlier,The establishment of production standards is based on types, and the formation of differences is innovation.
Whether it is a long video or a short video, the genre is very important. The genre represents the function of a video. Horror films need to scare and stimulate the senses of the audience, and romance films need to bring romantic emotions and feelings to the audience.
Innovation on the basis of satisfying functions brings about differences in positioning. The difference in positioning is not necessarily the difference in content ontology, but is influenced by the market and creative strategies, which will affect the psychological expectations of the audience.
The difference between long video and short video is that the audience of long video often has expectations, and whether it meets or exceeds the psychological expectations of the audience is the key to the success of long video.
Key nodes of content operation management
For content producers and managers, there are several key nodes in the marketing strategy of long video that deserve attention.
First of all, in the early development stage, we need to arouse the initial interest of the audience with core information.
Secondly, in the production stage, we need to know the type and functionality of the content and what emotional resonance we want to achieve in the audience’s mind.
Finally, in the filming stage, the focus of attention is the core marketing strategy, which needs to be decided after the marketing test of the audience. As well as the final declaration and guidance stage, it is necessary to check all the strategies.
In all these steps, we need a very systematic understanding and management, so that the long video can finally have an expected result.
Author: Fan Ying
