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IGTV - a massive opportunity for brands

So it seems that much of the world, and especially England, has been sidetracked by the World Cup (and let’s not forget Love Island), but while all eyes have been on Russia, Instagram unveiled an innovation that might just have a huge impact on content marketing - IGTV.

In case you were too engrossed in Saudi Arabia Vs Russia and missed the announcement  - IGTV is a long-form, vertical video platform that is available in the Instagram app as well as a standalone IGTV app. Obviously individuals and brands have been able to upload videos to Instagram for while but there have been limitations. IGTV addresses these and then some...

As our client Wochit explains

“The new platform is an amalgamation of concepts seen elsewhere – videos are shown vertically and fullscreen (like Snapchat or Instagram Stories), and brands or users host them on their own channels (similar to YouTube). Videos can be anywhere from 15 seconds to 1 hour in length and can be shared over a direct message, favourited or commented on like a regular Instagram post.”

IGTV has plenty going for it. For starters the massive popularity of Instagram with both Millennials and Gen Z. Secondly full-screen, vertical mobile videos with significant running times are a big point of difference with other social platforms. For brands there's the added carrot of ads being rolled out across the network at some point later in the year.

Needless to say the usual suspects (aka innovative brands and media companies) have piled in already. BuzzFeed, Vogue, BBC, The Economist, Louis Vuitton, Bacardi and Chipotle have already started experimenting with the format and we are seeing musicians use it to release new tracks and indeed albums.

There is one minor downside though, and that’s the fact that the vertical video format will cause some companies a few issues.

As Econsultancy explains there's no free lunch for brands on IGTV.

"One of the primary reasons for this is that IGTV uses the vertical video format. While it's theoretically possible to repurpose videos created for horizontal formats like YouTube's, more realistically publishers and brands will need to create content tailored to IGTV if they want to be successful. In other words, without an ability to quickly repurpose content, they will need to invest time and money in content creation for yet another digital platform.”

From Clarity's perspective we see IGTV as a massive opportunity for our consumer facing brands. We can see it being used for long term campaigns as well as tactically around key times of the year like Black Friday and Christmas.

As Wochit says in their blog post brands need to get their skates on.

"We see IGTV as a terrific opportunity for content marketers to place their brands at the forefront of the next major video platform – especially those who act fast."

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