Conditioned by expensive razor brands to nurse blades for as long as possible, Dollar Shave Club has to remind its members that they can, and should, change their blades weekly for a better shave.
The success metric was video view-time, with a challenge to see if we could get people to watch beyond :15, the optimal length for online video ads according to industry "best practices."
The advertising trend is to make online video shorter, but there are no :15s here. Instead, look forward to watching an old guy work out for 45 minutes, or a woman do a puzzle for 11 hours. Why? These are the max video lengths on Facebook and YouTube.
To make the dullest ads possible, we needed length. We already knew that video length "best practices" were misconceptions. It's not about length at all, but about introducing the brand message early.
In the interest of budget and production efficiency, we took on the challenge of shooting 27 hours of video in a single day. This meant capturing each video in one take, and time traveling. The cast and crew were champs at this. Especially the snail.
Our mind-numbingly dull videos were viewed for an average of 1:26, 250% more than Dollar Shave Club's norms and 600% more than industry benchmarks.
We proved that with the right message, we don't all have short attention spans. People hung around for, frankly, unbelievable amounts of time expecting something to happen in each dull scenario. Thousands watched the full 45-minute videos on Facebook, and a handful even made it through all 11 hours on YouTube, which means they were constantly exposed to our message for 39,600 seconds (we're not sure whether to be proud or worried).
