This hilarious Oreo Cookies video has gone a bit viral over the last couple of days with more than 50,000 Facebook shares, 70 blog posts, 3,000 tweets, and nearly 1 million views.
It is a long-form video ad (4 minutes long) produced by Wieden+Kennedy, the folks that created the Old Spice ads as well as Oreo’s Super Bowl ad (which I ranked among the Top 5 from the game).
Typically, I tell businesses that the videos we’ll produce are less than 3 minutes in length. While that is a good benchmark, it isn’t absolute. The Harlem Shake videos showed us you can creative a shareable video in 30 seconds. And a recently client, Maxim Global Wealth Advisors, shot a series of webinar-esque videos that exceeded five minutes.
Scott Simon, the anchor for NPR’s Weekend Edition, advises that stories have a point. Greg Jarboe, author of YouTube and Video Marketing, recently wrote an excellent post on ReelSEO, contending that the optimum length for a video be long enough to make a point. If you can effectively tell the story in 30 seconds, then do so. Or the 30 minutes it took for last year’s Kony video. Or you can take the four minutes that W+K takes to tell this funny story about a mad scientist inventing a way to separate the creme from the Oreo cookie.
I think it also says something about the creative wackiness of Portland, where this guy, the ad agency and I are located. Enjoy your Thursday!