Snapchat Shares New Data on the Rising Effectiveness of 6-Second Ads

With attention spans declining, and media consumption habits evolving, could 6-second video ads now be more effective than longer variants?

That’s what Snapchat’s contending, based on its latest research report. To glean more insight into how people’s response behaviors are shifting, Snap commissioned MAGNA Global to conduct a study of over 7,700 users, on both desktop and mobile devices, in order to get an idea of their reactions to varying video ad types.

The data highlights some interesting points of note – first off, Snapchat says that, regardless of length, full-screen vertical ads on Snapchat drove more than 2x the lift in awareness than other platforms tested.

That points to the immersion and engagement of Snapchat’s platform, which drives increased engagement with the content displayed, even promotions. Of course, that’s still relative to ad quality to some degree, but because ads are only 6-seconds long, that lessens the intrusion and further aligns with user behavior.

Snapchat also notes that its 6-second ads were more persuasive than 15-second slots across all age groups within the test pool.

However, the results here were not universal across all campaign types. Snapchat says that for brand launches, 15-second ads worked better.

As per Snap:

“We found that of the ads tested, the ads that marketed a new product saw longer lengths provided greater efficacy on Snapchat. Therefore, new product launches should be a time to consider Extended Play Commercials in your media mix.”

So when you’re looking to communicate more detail, like in your initial launch phase, you’ll likely want to consider longer explainers in your approach.

And this is also interesting – Snapchat additionally found that both custom ads created for Snapchat, and ads that were crafted from longer campaigns, performed similarly on the platform.

So you can cut down your longer video campaigns and re-shape them for Snap’s audience without seeing a significant downturn in performance. Again, the specifics of your creative do matter, but it’s worth noting that Snapchat added a Vertical Video Conversion tool in Snap Publisher last April, which will enable advertisers with horizontally-aligned assets to easily convert them into the vertical format.

Could be worth keeping in mind for your efforts.

The results here reiterate similar data to what Snapchat published back in December, which also showed that shorter video ads are now on par with longer video promotions, in terms of effectiveness.

That makes sense – as users become more accustomed to short-form content overall, through the popularity of Snaps, Stories, and now TikTok clips, that means that video messaging is also now increasingly effective in condensed form.

But worth specific note in this study is the impact on all age groups, not just younger audiences. That could be worth noting in your video marketing approach.

You can read Snapchat’s full video ad effectiveness report here.