Can You Sell Your Brand in 6 Seconds?

Vine may be dead. But the six-second video thing is still alive—and getting some serious play from Google. Their recent push behind six-second video content presents an intriguing opportunity for real estate brokerages to sell their brand to a younger, wider audience.

Here's how.

First, a little background

Pre-roll videos are ads that play before a YouTube video. You can allow viewers to skip your pre-roll ads. But if people can skip an ad, they will. And then your marketing content is, for all intents and purposes, impotent.

As an alternative, you can pay for a pre-roll ad that people can't skip. Your content plays and viewers have no choice but to watch and/or listen if they want to access their content. However, the inability to skip these ads detracts from their effectiveness. That is to say, though these ads 'reach' their intended audience, they just annoy the crap out of everyone.

6 seconds

So Google also offers six-second pre-roll 'bumper' videos. The idea of these 'bumper' videos is to avoid annoying viewers with forced commercials and simultaneously prevent them from skipping them.

The six-second video works for two reasons: one, according to YouTube, more than half of all YouTube videos are consumed on a mobile device. It's important to reach these viewers quickly, as videos eat data and data eats money. Two, humans only have an attention span of eight seconds. That attention span is shorter than a goldfish. And goldfish don't have smartphones.

So the six-second video is an ideal length—especially for an audience with a historically short attention span that uses their smartphone on a daily basis to peruse miscellaneous YouTube videos.