We shot a beautiful thirty-second film for a FMCG client. Three locations. Two days of production. A cast of five. The lighting was perfect. The grade was cinematic. The music swelled at just the right moment.
It launched on YouTube. The average view duration was 2.8 seconds.
2.8 seconds. Not even long enough to see the product. Certainly not long enough to feel anything about it.
The reality of video advertising is this: you're not making a film. You're making an interruption. And interruptions have three seconds to justify their existence.
Three seconds to make someone stop scrolling. Three seconds to make them forget they were trying to watch something else. Three seconds to earn the right to the next three seconds.
TikTok understands this instinctively. The best TikTok videos don't build to a payoff. They start with one. The hook isn't in the first three seconds. The hook is the first three seconds.
Compare that to traditional advertising thinking. We want to establish mood. Build atmosphere. Create tension. Resolve it beautifully at the end. Meanwhile, 90% of viewers left before we finished establishing mood.
I've watched clients spend ₹1.7 crore on production and ₹42 lakh on media. The production buys you beautiful frames. The media buys you impressions. But neither buys you attention. Attention is earned in the first three seconds, or it's not earned at all.
Dollar Shave Club understood this in 2012. Their launch video cost $4,500 to make—roughly ₹3.75 lakh. It opened with "Hi, I'm Mike, and I'm the founder of DollarShaveClub.com" while he walked through a warehouse. No mood building. No atmosphere. Just immediate, irreverent information. It got 26 million views and built a company that sold for $1 billion. Meanwhile, razor brands were spending millions on slow-burn TV spots nobody watched.
So what works? Conflict. Movement. Surprise. Questions. Faces. Anything that triggers the pattern-interrupt machinery in our ancient brains before our conscious minds can decide to keep scrolling.
The brands winning at video aren't making shorter ads. They're making ads where every second earns the next. Where frame one is interesting. Where you can stop watching at any point and still get something.
You've got three seconds to become entertainment. After that, you're just noise.