The long story of short video apps

Narrating a story in less than 15 seconds would have been an unthinkable proposition a few years ago. The explosion of diverse mediums, however, has dispelled all the conventional notions of storytelling. Worth mentioning is the proliferation and popularity of short video platforms, which witnessed massive growth especially in times of pandemic.

These short video platforms, the novel form of storytelling mediums, are increasingly used for promoting brands, with marketers and advertisers vouching for their efficacy in reaching out to their target audience, primarily using influencers.

After the ban on TikTok in India, many short-video platforms started proliferating in the market. Ever since, the consumption of content in such platforms witnessed a surge, with companies and marketers increasingly using them for their brand campaigns.

Here are the stories of some of the popular short video platforms. What their audiences want, what companies and brands do for promotion, how influencers play an important role, and many more things.

MX TakaTak

MX TakaTak, one of the short-video platforms that entered the market soon after the TikTok ban, offers significant content solutions to advertisers using the power of influencer marketing, helmed by some of India’s most loved content creators who help brands in fostering a special, authentic and personal relationship with the consumers.

“Influencers understand the pulse of the audience and they help them in curating compelling content with our hashtag challenges that become the source of communicating the brand’s values, image and other strategies to the end user,” said Viraj Jit Singh, SVP & Head of Revenue, MX Player & MX TakaTak.

He further said, “Another means of ensuring great engagement is on the back of our innovative content offerings that are authentic and relevant for the audiences. For example, live streaming has become an integral part of our offerings for our consumers and it has provided new avenues for creators on social media to reach out to a broader audience. A real-time connection with their audiences drives meaningful growth for creators and helps to foster an affinity for their brand with the end consumer. On MX TakaTak, we have creators across a variety of categories like dance, food, music, etc., going live on a daily basis.”

MX TakaTak has also onboarded celebrities from different occupations like Chef Ranveer Brar and sports icons like Suresh Raina and Virat Kohli, among others, who come on board to do these videos for the platform. “Opportunities like these are our tent poles that offer great engagement to our brands and have therefore been another growth driver for ad spends on our platform,” said Viraj Jit Singh.

Moj

Brands and advertisers have found an effective way to reach their target audiences in a seamless and entertaining way through Moj. They are expanding their ways in which brands, content creators, and consumers can engage with each other while enhancing their social experience on the platform.

Satyajit Deb Roy, Director of Sales, Moj, informed, “We have developed various tools that help brands optimise visibility and engagement by reaching out to the right audience for their product/ proposition. The Moj creator community is expressing themselves authentically by creating content in various niche genres like beauty, fashion, dance, cooking, education, sports, fitness to name a few.”

“In the era of hashtags, Moj has reimagined the concept of hashtag challenges. These quirky challenges are quick to attract, easy to engage with – for brands looking to fast-track their growth, gain virality and engage with millions of relevant users. Brands across categories, like FMCG, beverages, consumer services, entertainment, e-commerce, gaming, edutech are leveraging the platform to create tons of user-generated content and views on their branded hashtag as well as challenge videos,” he added.

Fantasy gaming platform PlayerzPot launched a hashtag campaign on Moj – #PlayerzPot Khela Kya. The pan-India campaign was spearheaded by 50+ influencers across different Indic languages.

“It was a massive success in terms of numbers as the campaign got over 1 billion views. The campaign also witnessed massive usage of the lens, where 300k+ user-generated content was created,” added Roy.

Trell

Brands engage with users on Trell through the differentiated content and ad offerings. This includes the influencer shoutout and I2C [Influencer to Commerce] flagship  offerings; shoppable video & in-feed ads and brand associations with the beauty and fashion IPs. The brands leverage the top Influencers/ key opinion leaders [KOLs] from the beauty, personal care, makeup and men’s grooming categories, who create meaningful content and act as the brand’s evangelists.

Brands that advertise on Trell are segmented under two categories: the marketplace and non-marketplace. Marketplace brands are brands that are listed on Trell Shop. According to Trell Vice President & Head of Monetisation, Dina D’Souza, this category includes brands from beauty, make-up, personal care, men’s grooming and health & fitness. HUL, Bombay Shaving Company, Plum, MamaEarth, Lotus Herbals, WOW Cosmetics, Beardo, Dr Vaidya, and Sirona are some of the brands that are active through ads from this category.

Non-marketplace categories such as fintech, food & beverage, telecom, gaming, media and entertainment have a high relevance to the overall content and audience on Trell. GCPL, ITC Personal Care, Emami, Myntra, Amazon Prime Video, Gameskraft, Games 24x7, CoinDCX, Coinswitch, Instagram, Rebel Foods, Kalyan Jewellers are a few brands from the non-marketplace categories that are active on the platform.

“This is ensuring high engagement and interaction rates for the brand on the platform. Our end-to-end influencer management programme, creative solutions in vernacular languages, and the community commerce platform is enabling brands to increase their user engagement and amplify their communication through the awareness, consideration and purchase sales cycle,” said D’Souza.

Traction in Tier 2 & 3 cities

MX TakaTak has become a key platform for brands to engage with a large pool of consumers in both metro and non-metro cities. Outside of the six metros, the platform has high engagement in Lucknow, Patna, Indore, Jaipur, Agra, Meerut, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Guwahati, Bhiwandi, Nagpur, Panipat, Dehradun and Gurgaon, among others.

The nature of content on Moj makes it most popular with the 18-30 demographic based out of Tier 1 metros/ cities.

“However, we are focused on continuing to onboard more and more creators from across Tier 1, 2, 3 cities to increase traction from cities beyond the top metros. Moj has an amazing pool of young talented creators coming from every part of the country. Our aim is to accelerate their growth by providing them, the best in class tools to create original content and provide monetisation opportunities for them to generate revenue from their content creation efforts,” said Satyajit Deb Roy.

Trell has seen a surge in users from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Dina D’Souza said, “Over 60% of our users are currently from these regions.”

She further said, “The users are currently consuming content in vernacular languages. They follow our key opinion leaders and influencers on the platform for tips, recommendations, and reviews of lifestyle brands and products that they can purchase online. Since 90% of our content is in vernacular languages, we are seeing this content attracting a lot of eyeballs and new users from the Tier 2 & 3 regions. This is definitely a game-changer for us and we are scaling this content and introducing more languages to cater to the aspirations of these new & emerging digital natives.”