News that Facebook had been erroneously reporting one of its measures of video watch-time has sparked a series of ad industry debates around trust, accountability and ultimately ‘viewability’. While these are important discussions to be having as digital marketing matures, now is also a key time to more widely consider what we mean by a video view and how that needs to increasingly influence our creative direction.

Over the last couple of years Facebook’s newsfeed has grown from hosting almost no native video to being increasingly dominated by the format, attracting billions of ad dollars in the process. Whilst the revealed measurement error didn’t affect any of the metrics by which Facebook video advertising was bought or sold, the over estimation of watch times may have accidentally helped cover up their platform’s potential Achilles heel.

They’ve won great plaudits for their ability to get video content in front of phenomenally large audiences but it’s never really been a secret that many of those people are watching just a few seconds of what’s shown to them, and often don’t have the sound on as they do so. Facebook themselves provide support and advice on how to best adapt creative for this environment but it is striking that much of the video going out on the platform isn’t optimised - making sure your key takeaway comes before the ‘skip’ button appears is a key starting point - and as such is in itself arguably a waste of media budgets.

Many marketers have been having great success with simple animations or ‘cinemagraphs’ on Facebook which only need to grab your attention for a few short seconds, and similarly others have found out that traditional TV adverts can be hugely ineffective if promoted there without suitable adaptions. If people only watch the first two seconds of your ad with no sound is there anything there they can take away? If your product reveal is tucked away at the very end, are 99% of your audience missing out on the punchline?

YouTube in contrast offers a TrueView advertising format whereby consumers have to watch at least five seconds of an ad and advertisers don’t pay a penny until they’ve watched at least 30 seconds. Clearly the latter approach forces longer watch times, which are in principle a useful metric to understand how much attention you’re really getting. If you’re left wondering why anyone would choose Facebook’s product at all, the answer is of course that it’s a lot cheaper to drive one of their shorter ‘views’ and that when you show impressions to enough people a few of them do end up watching the whole thing along the way. Research finds that partial or skipped views have a surprisingly large impact on consumers (see the image below) and thus certainly shouldn’t be completely discounted either.

The right approach to video measurement will always depend on specific business objectives – for instance do you need lots of people to hear a little from your brand, or would you rather fewer people really engage and understand a message? Whilst a shift to video may make digital advertising seem simpler, there remain many nuances in definition.

Any attempt at reporting video ‘views’ which casually throws together Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as if their metrics are comparable is a flawed approach, and some level of calibration is essential. And this is before you even begin to have a measure which brings parity with TV advertising, or countless other platforms. This is why forward-thinking media agencies are focusing such resources on tools which can help them truly unpack impact across different platforms.

There is also a need for all involved to draw a creative line in the sand, and to simply refuse running video assets which have not had the (often simple) tweaks made to suit these environments. Just as the early TV ads were radio ads with an image, the early online video ads have been repurposed TV ads, but as such they are missing much of the effectiveness opportunity.

Surprisingly there may be easier wins in adapting and animating print or outdoor advertising, itself inherently designed for quick and instant communication, than trying to squeeze 30 or 60 second videos down into a newsfeed friendly format. There are even services now which can let marketers make these adaptations, and rapidly test out different iterations, for fairly nominal costs.

It must have seemed an obvious decision in Facebook HQ to follow the advertising dollars and go all in on online video, but it may yet be a strategy that comes back to haunt them. As a platform capable of getting a message in front of billions of real people, wherever they are, in a visually engaging way and with efficient and controlled media options they are hard to beat. When you enter into the world of video, it’s a more complicated fight and it really does come down to what you’re willing to count as a view. This measurement discrepancy has certainly put their particular definition in the spotlight.

Marketers shouldn’t forget the static (or near static) brand building opportunities which first made Facebook a great platform- even as they struggle to get their heads around its role in their video mix. And while there’s no denying that there’s more video than ever before playing in your various newsfeeds, the right creative approach to such a fast moving environment has to be different to what you’d show an audience sat back and waiting in a cinema.

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