Shorter is Sweeter (And Smarter) — The Proof

When communicating, make your point early. While you still have your audience's attention.

Just one of the many brilliant things about digital branding/communications/advertising and the like is that the results are so easy to measure.  We look at a lot of results data at Rassak–and often use it to improve things, even on the fly. But the data is often proprietary and unshareable.  I thought I’d share one interesting tidbit with you from some personal communications I put out on the web last week. Nobody can yell at me (except me) for sharing this.

Last week was the week leading up to the Jewish new year AKA Rosh Hashana  (in fact it is actually today… so if I were an observant Jew I would not by typing right now!). I’ve traditionally made a new year greeting and sent it via email to people who I think would be interested in the week before the holiday. Even though my greetings have been in video format for a few years, this time I decided to upload the video to YouTube and share it that way.

Once the video is seen a minimum number of times, YouTube gives you back viewing data — demographics, etc. One of my favorites is the “hotspot” data. This data compares your video to other videos of similar length — and shows where people, on average, tend to leave your video.

My new year video, is about one and half minutes long. You can see, in the image above, where people begin to get a bit antsy. This data is based on about 900 or so views on YouTube.  If you like, you can check out my  video for yourself here. And happy new year!

Now.. not all videos (of course) have the same graph. Here’s a cool video of a guy explaining hotspots.. and he shows some of his graphs.