In a world of increas­ing­ly short atten­tion spans and bad air­line ser­vice, Vir­gin Amer­i­ca made a com­pelling case for long-form video con­tent in detail­ing the strat­e­gy behind its own bold con­tent move with a near­ly six-hour video.

It’s an exam­ple of a brand with a firm sense of pur­pose – seek­ing to dis­tin­guish itself from oth­er air­lines with an equal­ly unique video – and that also had fun with the con­tent and con­cept.

But the brand and its agency cau­tioned recent­ly at ad:tech that even though the long-form video worked for Vir­gin in this case, rather than con­tent length, mar­keters’ focus should be on know­ing a brand’s pur­pose, as well as on chang­ing con­sumer behav­ior and atti­tude, in addi­tion to what­ev­er exe­cu­tion works for a giv­en idea.

Have You Been Flying Blah Airlines?

Jon Gor­don, cre­ative design direc­tor at Vir­gin Amer­i­ca, said while there are obvi­ous advan­tages to being short and con­cise, Vir­gin nev­er­the­less set out to make the longest ad pos­si­ble in its Have You Been Fly­ing BLAH Air­lines? video.

Gor­don calls the spot, which is near­ly six hours long, the “longest ad ever” – which may have been true until Arby’s debuted its 8- and 13-hour videos of brisket and turkey roast­ing – and he said the brand wasn’t sure if con­sumers would actu­al­ly watch the video, but they did. Indeed, per YouTube, the video has more than 830,000 views since it post­ed in Octo­ber, despite what the brand says includ­ed lit­tle overt pro­mo­tion.

In fact, per Aryan Amin­zadeh, senior cre­ative writer at cre­ative mar­ket­ing agency Eleven, the film is near­ly six hours long in order to show­case pre­cise­ly what it’s like to fly across the U.S. on a “bor­ing” air­line. She also said she was unsure whether con­sumers would watch – and keep watch­ing – if that’s all there was.

While Blah Air­lines is cer­tain­ly bor­ing, the team took care to inter­sperse just enough con­tent to keep con­sumers watch­ing. What’s more, the team cre­at­ing the video was able to refer to its own painful flight expe­ri­ences on oth­er air­lines to “cre­ate bor­ing yet inter­est­ing con­tent to watch,” she said.

In oth­er words, the video is full of addi­tion­al bits and pieces, like two inflight movies, as well as a cast of char­ac­ters like a ram­bunc­tious child and bach­e­lorette par­ty attendee who has had too much to drink. In addi­tion, Blah Air­lines’ enter­tain­ment options include lis­ten­ing to the dic­tio­nary read aloud and Air Junk mag­a­zine, where cus­tomers can buy prod­ucts like paper clips and bricks.

And, she notes, view­ers don’t see any Vir­gin brand­ing until approx­i­mate­ly three hours and 30 min­utes into the video when a Vir­gin plane flies by. View­ers who scroll over the plane are invit­ed to “take a rad­i­cal depar­ture” and are then tak­en to the Vir­gin book­ing page.

Amin­zadeh also said the brand made a pur­pose­ful deci­sion not to include time codes to tip off view­ers, and it’s “amaz­ing how much word spread [about where the parts were] and it’s not an adver­tis­er feed­ing them, ‘Watch this, watch that.”

As a result, Amin­zadeh said the brand saw a 621 per­cent increase in con­ver­sa­tions and 138 mil­lion earned media impres­sions as video pre­roll.

Gor­don also said the brand want­ed to “extend the bad flight expe­ri­ence beyond the flight itself.”

In order to do so, Vir­gin seed­ed mul­ti­ple ways to get in touch with Blah Air­lines through­out, includ­ing a web­site, as well as phone and fax num­bers, an email address, a live chat option and con­tent on social chan­nels. Per Gor­don, the Twit­ter han­dle includes “canned feed­back” and the Insta­gram chan­nel has “tons of unin­spir­ing pho­tos.”

‘Shake Travelers Out of Autopilot’

Gor­don said Vir­gin came onto the scene “to make fly­ing good again,” and notes the bar for the prod­uct expe­ri­ence (i.e., fly­ing) was quite low, so the brand sought to improve the prod­uct itself by adding perks like enter­tain­ment sys­tems on the back of every seat on its planes, along with oth­er extras like Wi-Fi, out­lets, and mood light­ing.

“The prob­lem we were fac­ing is that peo­ple are behold­en to lega­cy air­lines, so we want­ed to remind them they have a choice,” Gor­don said. “So we went to our part­ner Eleven with this in mind to shake trav­el­ers out of autopi­lot.”

Instead of short ads with mes­sag­ing about the brand’s ameni­ties and advan­tages, Vir­gin opt­ed to go in the oppo­site direc­tion with a six-hour film about fly­ing on its com­pe­ti­tion in which it “shared an expe­ri­ence where there was noth­ing to do, which is the oppo­site of our prod­uct,” Gor­don said.

And thus Blah Air­lines was born.

The Content Formula

As a result, Amin­zadeh said the brand learned there is no pre­cise for­mu­la for whether to pro­duce long- or short-form con­tent. It’s real­ly just what works for a giv­en idea.

“Our idea was we want­ed to show you how bor­ing it is when you’re not on Vir­gin and let’s do it all the way and take it seri­ous­ly,” she said.

Marc Lands­berg, CEO of social media agency socialde­viant, said not every unit of con­tent will lead to a con­ver­sion, but the point here was to get con­sumers talk­ing about Vir­gin in anoth­er way.

“The pur­chase fun­nel is non­lin­ear now and inher­ent­ly social, so you have to find ways to cre­ate val­ue for con­sumers,” Lands­berg said. “We fun­da­men­tal­ly believe the mar­ket­ing job to be done in all cas­es is to change behav­ior and then through that behav­ior change, change atti­tude, and build some loy­al­ty ver­sus old mar­ket­ing [tac­tics] that want­ed to change atti­tude and then behav­ior.”

In oth­er words, mar­keters shouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly ape Vir­gin and roll out their own six-hour videos. That’s because in order to be suc­cess­ful with con­tent of any length, brands must first fig­ure out what makes them tick.

Per Lands­berg, con­tent is the expres­sion of brand pur­pose and it’s easy to point to brands that gen­uine­ly know their pur­pose, such as Nike, which is about the inner ath­lete, and Apple, which is about bring­ing tech­nol­o­gy to human­i­ty. Or per­haps, say, Vir­gin.

“Once you nail [brand pur­pose], you can express your­self cre­ative­ly,” Lands­berg said.

It also shouldn’t be about cre­at­ing con­tent for a spe­cif­ic plat­form. In fact, per Lands­berg, plat­form is one of the last things he talks about. Instead, he said he looks at the mar­ket­ing job to be done, the fun­da­men­tal truth about the audi­ence, and then nar­ra­tive con­tain­ers and con­tent types.

“New plat­forms come and go,” Lands­berg said. “We love to ask our­selves, ‘What’s the best nar­ra­tive con­tain­ers?’ and then match that to the con­sumer need state.”

Regard­less of whether a brand opts for short- or long-form con­tent, the mod­el must res­onate with the audi­ence, he said. And brands must think care­ful­ly about the medi­um for shar­ing the idea. They must also think about their objec­tive and why con­sumers go to giv­en plat­forms. Then they should think about con­tent types and the for­mat in which the idea comes to life and anchor con­tent around the audi­ence, Lands­berg said.

“The ques­tion isn’t long or short, it’s, ‘Is this the right con­tent for the right audi­ence on the right plat­form in the right moment?’”

Brands must also iden­ti­fy the rea­son for cre­at­ing the idea and tie it into an emo­tion­al need, which can even include func­tion­al needs such as pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion.

“What nev­er changes is the anchor around the human con­di­tion,” Lands­berg said. “Try to make sure to com­bine a fun­da­men­tal human need with the mar­ket­ing job to be done.”

Have you found your con­sumers have a pref­er­ence for long-form or short-form video con­tent?