How Brands and Marketers Can Create Long Form Vertical Videos for IGTV

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How Brands and Marketers Can Create Long Form Vertical Videos for IGTV

Bryan Karas

August 27, 2018

There’s been a lot of chatter among content creators and marketers about the monstrosity that is vertical video – just imagine George Lucas shooting Star Wars in a vertical format…yuck.

But with the growth in mobile and the increase in content and media consumption on these devices, vertical video formats are pretty much the norm. Unfortunately, for people that want to watch more than epic fail videos, vertical video has never been the go-to format for high quality, cinematic production.

Until now…

For their 130th anniversary, Mercedes launched a new campaign across multiple social platforms called “The First Drive.” It’s a two minute video telling the story of Bertha Benz, the woman who drove the first car back in 1888.

“The First Drive” is said to be the very first cinematic production to be launched on IGTV since it was released in June. If Mercedes, one of the world’s top brands, is producing video content in a vertical format, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Jumping off the bridge…

Other brands have tested IGTV over the last few months as well. Bacardi launched the first ever “fan directed” music video called “Live Moves.” Nat Geo took it a step further and aired the last episode of “One Strange Rock” – the 47-minute show was adapted for vertical screens. The video has over 13 million views.

So there are some IGTV success stories out there…

But some haven’t been so lucky. Stylist, a major content publisher, reallocated IGTV resources over to Apple News because it made them more money.

At the end of the day it comes down to what your goals are…

If you’re a brand that wants to get eyeballs on your content then IGTV looks promising but if you’re a publisher who needs to drive clicks to a website it’s probably better to wait and see if FB decides to invest more by building a direct response ad unit for it…

Going vertical

Unlike most of the IGTV channels you see, the Mercedes video was not shot vertically – only edited to be viewed in a vertical format.

There are three ways to shoot video for IGTV – shoot vertical video on your smartphone, shoot vertical video on your camera or shoot horizontal video and edit it in post-production. Here’s an awesome resource that tells you how to do all of that.

Already have a database full of videos? No problemo, here’s a great tutorial on how to turn those horizontally shot videos into vertical ones…

The Mega-Ultimate Complete Guide to Marketing on IGTV

If you aren’t too familiar with IGTV then take a look at this complete guide on how to get started. It covers everything from what it is, optimal settings, analytics and content creation. It’s too soon to tell if IGTV will catch on and go mainstream but I’m sure FB is gathering plenty of data to make a decision.