The Conversation We Have Almost Every Week

Brand wants a 20-second cut. Marketing team pushes back on a piece that runs over a minute. Someone in the room says people don't have the attention span for a five-minute ad anymore. The conversation we keep having is about whether long-form brand content still has a place.

We get it. Some platforms reward shorter cuts, paid social loves a quick-hit, and the 15-second vertical has its place. None of that is going away.

But the idea that attention spans are getting shorter? That part doesn't hold up.

Attention Spans Aren't Shrinking

People binge eight-hour limited series on a Tuesday night. Three-hour podcast episodes on the way to work. 90-minute YouTube essays about a video game from 2003. Documentaries longer than a flight to Chicago.

The same audience is supposedly incapable of watching a five-minute brand ad? Doesn't track.

The famous "people have an eight-second attention span, less than a goldfish" stat that gets quoted everywhere has been debunked for years. The original study didn't even measure what people remembered hearing. People have all the attention in the world for things they want to watch. The hard part is being something they want to watch.

What the Adidas Ad Just Proved

A five-minute Adidas ad dropped recently. Five whole minutes. (Yes, the kind of length that would get pushback in any normal brand brief.)

It did over 1.5 million views in its first 24 hours. People watched it. They shared it. They sat with it. Five minutes of brand content that the internet decided was worth the time.

The reason wasn't its length. The reason was the work. It looked beautiful. It felt like something. It earned the watch the same way any good film does.

Most of these conversations miss that part. Long isn't the problem, length never was. The work has to earn the watch, and good work always does, at any length.

The Real Problem Is Everything Looking the Same

The real problem with all-short, all-the-time is that everything starts to look the same.

Same length, same pacing, same hook patterns, same TikTok-first edit style adapted to every other platform.

When every brand is making the shortest possible content, the feed flattens. A 15-second piece that's beautifully made still looks like every other 15-second piece scrolling by.

Long-form content is a place to stand out because most brands aren't going there. Going longer creates room for story, for craft, for tone, for the parts of a brand that don't compress into a quick-hit format. The brands that take up that space get noticed.

This works for brand films, founder docs, manifestos, mini-docs, hero spots that take their time. The category is wide open right now.

The Platforms Reward Longer Content Too

The conversation about attention spans usually skips this part. The platforms have been quietly extending allowed video length for years.

YouTube's algorithm rewards watch time, not just clicks. Instagram now lets you post videos up to 60 minutes. TikTok keeps pushing the cap higher (a few years ago it was 60 seconds, then 3 minutes, then 10, then 60). LinkedIn surfaces posts that hold attention. Even paid platforms reward higher complete-view rates.

What's going on isn't a platform problem with longer content. The platforms want longer content. They want videos people stay for. The brands that give them that get rewarded, both in reach and in real engagement.

Build for Both. Lead With the Long Piece.

This isn't an argument against short-form. (Short-form is great. We make a lot of it. We will make a lot more.) The argument is against making short-form the whole strategy.

The brands doing this well are building the long piece first, then cutting it down. The hero is the five-minute brand film, the documentary, the mini-doc, the founder spot. The cutdowns become the teasers, the social shorts, the stories, the paid units. Same shoot, same story, designed to live across every length the platforms want.

The longer piece anchors the campaign. The shorter pieces drive people to it. The whole thing earns more than the sum of its 15-second parts.