Dive Brief:
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GE Healthcare produced a 30-minute video titled “Heroines of Health” that tells the story of three women who are working to bring healthcare to their communities in India, Africa and Southeast Asia, Adweek reported. Every day for a month, a one-minute subtitled clip from the film appears on Instagram at a dedicated account: heroinesofhealthfilm.
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The videos had more than 250,000 views, 80,000 likes and 400 bookmarks on Instagram after one week. The full half-hour film will appear on Facebook later this month and the brand is promoting the initiative on Twitter.
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GE Healthcare broke the movie into 60-second segments to make it more appealing to mobile audiences that tend to scroll through content quickly while not giving videos much of a chance. Documentary filmmaker Lisa Russell worked with GE on the video.
Dive Insight:
GE Healthcare’s novel approach to promoting a documentary on social media shows some of the challenges with delivering video to a mobile audience, including grabbing the attention of viewers so they'll engage with the content. The company chose Instagram because the photo-sharing app works for linear and non-linear viewing, and has a large audience outside the U.S., spokeswoman Sarah Wills told Adweek. Instagram had 700 million users as of April, with 80% of that audience outside the U.S.
GE Healthcare isn’t alone in recognizing the challenges of mobile video. Marketers face a key challenge in creating engaging ads for smartphones while avoiding the tendency to repurpose video made for other platforms like TV and desktop computers, according to a study released last month by YouAppi. Ninety-six percent of respondents claimed they faced challenges with mobile video, and the leading challenge cited by 44% of them was developing compelling creative.
The second biggest challenge cited by 35% of respondents was finding properties to effectively deliver video. Forty-two percent of respondents said that they run their mobile videos on six or more channels, while 17% run mobile videos on more than 20 different channels. Ninety-four percent of respondents to the YouAppi survey said the importance of mobile video has increased in the past few years, and 93% said mobile video will continue to grow in importance.
