Viewing of video-like contents has, in history, been horizontal on most mediums, tarting with the rectangular, horizontal TV then YouTube and finally major social media platforms including the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The main advantage of horizontal content view is bigger viewer perspective for the users and content consumers. This in turn will allow more room to place potential traditional (Google Adwords) and interactive marketing ads.
Off to a tangent, interactive mobile marketing ads is an area I have yet to see any dramatic improvements in. The implementation of interactive marketing ads might just skip the whole mobile curve and latch onto the VR sector. VR provides a very interactive platform for consumers to view interactive ads. However, two major issues still remain to be solve, (1) economy of scale for VR users and (2) personalized marketing ads. Most Companies that market their products wants to reach as many potential users as they possible can, (Unless the company is selling an extremely inelastic and/or highly-priced items). The current problem VR is the adoption rate curve is pretty flat and we have yet to see the hockey-curve adoption rate to take shape.
Another thing to note is that the size and pixel density of smartphone screens have been on a upward trajectory for the past years, which might have allow the growth of vertical videos. However, numerous surveys and company strategies (Apple coming out with the iPhone SE edition and smaller HTC10 flagship smartphone) looks like consumers is now demanding a smaller screen size on their smartphones. I personally like my screen size to be 5-5.5 inches and nothing bigger than that because I find my personal user experience to decline inversely with screen size.
Horizontal content-viewing perspective provides way more value to the marketing agency, companies trying to market their products and users/viewers/content consumers. However, with the success and popularity of Snapchat, vertical video is on it’s way to make vertical video the new standard. As of today, May 2nd, I updated my FB app and noticed not only did FB implemented a more user-friendly functionality for vertical video viewing but also the same to photo viewing. I just remembered FB Live also has a UX enhanced for vertical viewing, with square-shaped live video on the top half and user engagement in the bottom half. According to Gabe Chan, the global director @ DJI, the largest, by far, consumer drone startup , “We need to be in front of [users] in some way that’s not intrusive—it isn’t a banner, it isn’t boring…So vertical video seems like a very logical choice to us and to any advertiser in digital marketing now.” The question still remains, is Snapchat, FB, Twitter and other major platforms driving the vertical video trend or is the consumer demand it.
Intersection notepad 