It’s too late for brands to cre­ate video con­tent that will top the best of 2014 lists, but not too late to learn key lessons for 2015 from this year’s win­ners. In par­tic­u­lar: Videos are get­ting longer and more sen­si­tive. They also tar­get engaged audi­ences and cre­ate shared moments.

Accord­ing to YouTube, the top video ads of 2014 came from brands like Nike, Bud­weis­er, Always, Dura­cell, Sam­sung, P&G, Heineken and the movie Devil’s Due based on audi­ence engage­ment and reten­tion met­rics, as well as views.

So what is it about these ads that made them so suc­cess­ful? And what can brands learn from them?

Brands Are Making Longer Videos

Where­as the long time rule of thumb with video con­tent was short­er is bet­ter, mul­ti­ple ads on the list this year are 1:00 in length with the longest clock­ing in at 5:28.

And the aver­age sits at just over three min­utes. And YouTube says not only are the top ads near­ly 50 per­cent longer com­pared to last year, view­ers also tuned longer, spend­ing around 50 per­cent more time watch­ing them.

Accord­ing to Jonathan Ste­fan­sky, CEO of inter­ac­tive video firm Viewbix.com, this means the indus­try is mov­ing away from stan­dard 30-sec­ond video spots. And while even though com­ple­tion rates may be short­er with longer videos, he said longer videos have bet­ter engage­ment rates. And this is a trend he expects to see con­tin­ue in 2015.

Brands Are Making Videos That Are Warm And Fuzzy

The pop­u­lar videos also pull at view­ers’ heart­strings like Bud­weis­er and P&G have done, Ste­fanksy said.

In a sim­i­lar vein, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Strate­gist Aaron Zakows­ki said the trend he notices is a mes­sage of empow­er­ment. That includes the videos from Always and Dura­cell.

“Enter­tain­ment is nice, but the brands that leave their view­ers real­ly feel­ing good about them­selves are the ones that are going to cre­ate the most long-last­ing brand affin­i­ty from view­ers,” Zakows­ki said. “I think that Always’ ‘#LikeA­Girl’ video and Dura­cel­l’s ‘Trust Your Pow­er’ video both did an awe­some job of leav­ing view­ers empow­ered to real­ly be all that they can be and nev­er to let oth­ers lim­it their poten­tial.”

Greg Jar­boe, pres­i­dent of con­tent mar­ket­ing agency SEO-PR, also points to the Ice Buck­et Chal­lenge. Call­ing it “the most talked-about social video cam­paign for social good this year,” he said, “The cam­paign gave mas­sive expo­sure to the dis­ease and across the mil­lions of video uploads from celebri­ties and mem­bers of the pub­lic alike, gen­er­at­ed a bil­lion views on YouTube and 10 bil­lion views on Face­book.”

It also allowed brands like Coke, McDonald’s, Tar­get, KFC and Best Buy to jump on the prover­bial band­wag­on.

Brands Are Creating Videos To Target Deeply Engaged Audiences

Ste­fan­sky said some of the year’s top video ads were also tar­get­ed to real­ly engaged audi­ences like foot­ball fans.

Jar­boe agrees, not­ing it was also a big year for live sports with the Olympics and the World Cup, so brands were increas­ing­ly able to use YouTube to reach fans before and after games.

“And for good rea­son — the top 10 Super Bowl and World Cup ads this year earned a remark­able 14 mil­lion hours of watch time, with 75 per­cent of those hours con­sumed before or after the events them­selves,” Jar­boe adds.

The videos come from big brands.

The top video ads are also most­ly from large brands, Ste­fan­sky notes. The ques­tion now, he said, is whether small­er brands will be able to lever­age what big brands are doing and emu­late the style that is work­ing for them.

So how exact­ly do they do that?

Brands Should Play Around With Timing

Ste­fan­sky said brands should remem­ber they’re not con­strained to 30-sec­ond spots and exper­i­ment with longer form videos, doing A/B test­ing with dif­fer­ent video lengths to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what their audi­ences want.

Brands Should Borrow Lessons From TV Advertising

The ads on the 2014 list incor­po­rate many of the same ele­ments that work well in great TV adver­tis­ing, notes Kyle Bunch, group direc­tor of mobile and social plat­forms at dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing firm R/GA. That means start­ing “with a real­ly strong insight about the audi­ence a brand is try­ing to reach and [speak­ing] to an inher­ent human choice and [look­ing at whether it] does it in a way that makes an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion with the audi­ence,” he said.

That also means the videos tell strong sto­ries that play on share­able dynam­ics, include ele­ments that are time­ly and rel­e­vant and elic­it strong emo­tion­al respons­es.

And these things, he said, are “blend­ed with a lot of things that work well on the Inter­net, like cats, dogs and things that make peo­ple laugh.”

Brands Should Create Shared Moments

In addi­tion, Bunch rec­om­mends cre­at­ing a shared moment a la CardStore.com and its #World­sTough­estJob video.

“I think that’s a real­ly nice stand­out exam­ple of some­thing that has that right degree of the unex­pect­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly a kind of cul­tur­al moment of watch­ing it and expe­ri­enc­ing it and the big reveal moment,” he said. “An expe­ri­ence like that stands out as there’s a shared moment in watch­ing it and [view­ers] want to take it to social and share it.”

Who And What Is Missing?

Anoth­er inter­est­ing con­sid­er­a­tion is what is not on the list: Bunch said that despite the so-called “rise of the YouTube star,” YouTube stars are con­spic­u­ous­ly absent from the list.

He nev­er­the­less still expects to see more videos with influ­encers next year.

Jar­boe said that by look­ing at the Mash­able Glob­al Ads Chart for the last year, it is inter­est­ing to con­sid­er which brands are miss­ing if you look at the top brands by indus­try.

For exam­ple, the top air­line in the 2014 Christ­mas ads is from West­Jet, so Jar­boe asks, “Where are Unit­ed Air­lines, Delta Air Lines or Amer­i­can Air­lines?”

In addi­tion, UPS is on the list, but not FedEx. And Sam­sung Mobile is on the list, but not Apple’s iPhone. The same is also true of the auto indus­try, he notes.

“In oth­er words, there are a lot of big brands that still haven’t fig­ured out social video,” Jar­boe said. “Going for­ward, will they just keep doing what they’re doing, or will they stop being big brands?”

Other Predictions

Accord­ing to Ste­fan­sky, there is a trend toward dri­ving view­er engage­ment with­in videos as opposed to views being the only met­ric of suc­cess. He expects brands will be smarter in 2015 about under­stand­ing video ROI and fac­tor­ing in their objec­tives, like down­load­ing con­tent or becom­ing a social fol­low­er.

In addi­tion, per Jar­boe, “track­ver­tis­ing,” or a music video co-released by a brand and an artist, where the col­lab­o­ra­tion is clear­ly announced either in the video title, video descrip­tion or with­in the video itself, is “off the charts.”

In addi­tion, he said music videos are the most shared type of video con­tent on the social web, with an aver­age share rate of 7.1 per­cent com­pared to brand videos at 2.1 per­cent, and “music trig­gers deep-seat­ed emo­tion­al respons­es, which are crit­i­cal to brands as emo­tion­al inten­si­ty is the most sig­nif­i­cant vari­able in dri­ving social activ­i­ty. So, I expect more brands will col­lab­o­rate with artists to cre­ate ‘track­verts’ in 2015,” he said.

What do you think brands can learn from the year’s top video ads on YouTube?