Year in Review // Auto-Play-On-Mute
Summarizing an entire year of changes and trends in integrated marketing isn't easy. Nor is it really possible. So instead of doing that, I thought I'd focus on one very, very specific evolution in video that's not a trend, but instead a movement. It can be summed-up in one super-hyphenated word: Auto-Play-On-Mute.
Yep, Auto-Play-On-Mute. It's where you scroll on ANY Social platform and the video automatically starts playing with captions (or graphics on some newer, shorter-form platforms). So why is this important? Social platforms pioneered auto-play-on-mute, and they did this to help their users consume video content. If you want to think about it, photos could always be consumed in this fashion (it's not fair, I know). But video wasn't so fortunate and it took a while for auto-play-on-mute to evolve and make its way mainstream. Now it's here, and users love it. So why can't your website do it?
Therein lies the reflection of the year: why can't and aren't most websites leveraging auto-play-on-mute like Social platforms are? For the most part, this question can be answered in two simple ways by most brands:
They don't have a video strategy that would work well on their primary owned-content platform (web)
It’s very technically challenging to execute from a development perspective (mostly when things change and need maintenance to keep working)
To the first response, we always encourage that brands craft a video strategy that matches their positioning in the market so it has the ability to be executed as auto-play-on-mute on their websites. So if the brand is investing in video as part of their Social strategy, but they are investing in short-form, vertical videos that aren't story-driven and actually useful to their users, they wouldn't think of placing that video on their website. That makes sense. So what we recommend is they take a couple steps back and before shooting video and make sure the video content they will create supports market positioning.
To the second response, we say: anything worth doing will be challenging. I think there are a great number challenges making auto-play-on-mute work on desktop, and of course it won't work on mobile...yet. Where there's a challenge, there's a competitive moat. If it's difficult for you to figure out, it means it'll be difficult for your competitors, too. If your brand can see-through the technical challenges of making auto-play-on-mute work on their website, they are doing better than 99% of their competitors as of this writing at the end of 2021. I'll be curious to read these words in 5 years and see where things have gone.
Don't sleep on auto-play-on-mute. It's been the biggest movement of 2021 we've witnessed and we don't think it's growth in popularity is going anywhere soon.
