You won’t get to the end of this post, right? It’s not a video, meme, gif or tiktok so it will be curtains by the time you get to the second paragraph. Because people have really short attention spans – don’t they?

Maybe not.

The received piece of wisdom that people have shorter attention spans than a goldfish all comes from a 2015 report Microsoft Canada did studying brain patterns of a whopping 120 people doing various tasks. A clever fellow at the BBC has done a lot of digging to debunk the myth which of course you’re going to read about here.

Attention spans aren’t getting shorter, it’s just harder to stay focused in such a hyperlinked world. If your content is good enough people will stay engaged. Ask Wagner fans.

OK you can stop reading now. Go see Gotterdammerung maybe.

The best performing ad we made for a client recently was 37s, outperforming the 15s CTR by nearly 0.25%. By all means put the juicy stuff up front, get your punters interested, but if you engage and entertain there’s no need to strobe all your content in a nanosecond.

Of course all the social platforms do have their nuances in terms of ideal video length, particularly from a marketing perspective. In this respect, hubspot have done the heavy lifting and done some research on the ideal durations for platforms, which we’ll pinch here: