Video Marketing Trends

TikTok’s spectacular success is not only changing #socialmedia but also brings about far-reaching, cross-industry repercussions that touch e-commerce, digital #advertising, #payments and beyond. Let’s take a look. TikTok is the first Chinese app to take off in the west. Originally launched in 2016 as Douyin by Chinese tech company ByteDance, it became available worldwide in 2018 and is now active in 154 countries. It has managed to reach 1 billion users faster than any other social media app. As in most successful businesses, the concept behind is fairly simple: a video-sharing app that makes it extremely easy for users to create and share short videos. Plus one major novelty that has made all the difference: contrary to other social-media platforms, TikTok is not dependent on one’s network of friends or acquaintances but it has an extremely fast-learning algorithm that brings up videos – from its entire database – based on what users like. As a result, anyone can go viral without the need for thousands or millions of connections or followers. The statistics speak volumes: TikTok users spend on average over 1.5 hours on the platform with 60% belonging to Generation Z (born during the late 1990s and early 2000s). In the US, TikTok has become the most popular place to watch videos, overtaking all other social media platforms. It is, therefore, not by accident that major players, from Meta (Facebook) to YouTube to Pinterest and to even Netflix, have been trying – with limited success – to emulate TikTok’s model and practices. Beyond the appeal of short, funny videos, TikTok’s ascend is changing the name of the game in a number of industries. Start with #digital advertising: According to Omdia, TikTok's advertising revenues will increase from $13 bn in 2022 to $44 bn by 2027, while TikTok Douyin (the app in China) will skyrocket from $28 bn to $76 bn. By 2027 online video advertising will generate over $331 bn globally, with TikTok accounting for 37% of those revenues or $120 bn. For comparison, YouTube and Meta combined, are estimated to hold 24% of the market or $77 bn. On the #ecommerce side, TikTok has launched in various geographies (i.e. UK, Southeast Asia, US) live shops on user profiles so that users can make purchases without leaving the app. If TikTok gets this right, shopping live-streams can be the next big thing in e-commerce, boosting revenues and brand loyalty. In China, TikTok now generates most of its revenue from direct in-app sales and is rapidly taking away market share from established e-commerce giants like JD and Alibaba. Douyin is heavily betting (in China) in the so-called “interest e-commerce” (driven by people’s interests and passions), hoping to increasingly attract consumers via a multi-channel approach (short videos, livestreaming, searches, etc). The world is changing faster than we think (and definitely swifter than some can follow). Opinions: my own, Graphic sources: WSJ, Statista, BM Toolbox

India’s FMCG food & beverage market has crossed $100 Bn. By 2030, it is expected to grow by ~50% across channels. What’s interesting isn’t the size of the market - it’s the speed and direction of change happening right now. While 4% of it came from quick commerce in 2025, that number is expected to rise to ~18% in the next 5 years. Quick commerce is turning out to be the single biggest disruptor in India’s F&B space. Three shifts are fundamentally reshaping how Indians eat and drink, as per a recent report from Redseer Strategy Consultants - 1. Convenience is being redefined - the RTC space is having a genuine renaissance. → The frozen RTC category on QC nearly doubled year-on-year to ~$375 Mn in 2025. The batter category alone is a $400 Mn market where QC already commands over 20% share. → What’s aiding this is improving cold chain infrastructure - both backend storage and transit handling. In earlier days, this was always a sore point for brands. → Consumers are thinking in terms of fast, low-effort, and portion control. Brands that understand this - and design around meal occasions rather than individual SKUs - will win. 2. Health is going mass, and the headroom is immense. → Quick-comm is growing at over 100% in the functional and healthy beverage segment. → The distribution barrier that once kept healthier products confined to select modern trade stores is gone. The right consumer can now be reached in minutes - not hoping they walk into the right aisle. → The opportunity isn’t to compete in existing segments. It’s to define new daily consumption rituals entirely. 3. Indulgence has a new address, and impulse is no longer a store-aisle moment - it’s turning out to be a late night moment. → Half of all incremental chocolate sales growth between 2024 and 2025 was unlocked by quick commerce. Nearly 20% of online chocolate GMV is generated after 9 PM, with average selling prices rising 1.3x in that window. Brands that treat quick commerce as just another channel for SKU listing will fall behind. It is a live consumer insights engine, a product testing ground, and an always-on demand channel. For GT-first brands, it’ll be important to understand that consumers - particularly the urban, Millennials and Gen Zers - are discovering brands digitally, and their purchasing frequencies coupled with basket sizes have altered completely. Quick-commerce needs to be a complementary channel - where products are placed for trial, impulse purchase, and data. General trade remains the engine for scale, trust, and deep market penetration. Both channels will feed each other. India’s F&B market will not bifurcate into offline and online worlds. It will integrate into one complex, multi-occasion, multi-channel reality. The brands that recognise this won’t just grow, but also define the next decade of Indian F&B. #India #food #beverage #quickcommerce

🚨 BREAKING: LinkedIn's video feed is officially back in the UK. After months of testing and pulling back, the dedicated video tab has returned to mobile. It's rolling out gradually, so you might not see it yet. The interesting part: This isn't just a UK feature anymore. It's global. That means content you post here can now surface in video feeds across the US and other markets. For UK-based brands and creators, this is a significant distribution unlock. What this means for your content strategy: 1/ Video isn't replacing text and images. The hybrid approach wins. Use all three formats strategically. 2/ In a feed increasingly flooded with AI-generated content, video is your human differentiator. It's the format where authenticity actually shows. 3/ Gen Z is entering decision-making roles. They grew up on video-first platforms. The demand is only going up. 4/ LinkedIn has been quietly improving video quality and rolling out monetization tools like Brand Link and Top Voices 360. They're serious about this. This isn't a feature experiment. It's a platform shift. The video feed is here to stay. If you've been waiting for the right moment to invest in video on LinkedIn... this is it. We just dropped a full breakdown on what this means and how to approach it 👇

The biggest opportunity across social media right now is LinkedIn short-form video. LinkedIn hasn't been shy about wanting more people to share video on the platform, either. It's been investing heavily in video-first features: 🎥 A dedicated video tab that allows you to watch videos in an immersive experience. 📲 The "Videos For You" feature, which brings a carousel of recommended videos to your feed. Plus, it’s leveraging its marketing channels and data to encourage people to share video. These efforts are paying off, too: 🎥 Video is LinkedIn's fastest-growing format 🚀 A 34% year-over-year increase in video uploads 📊 Weekly immersive video views are up 6x quarter over quarter This means there's a big opportunity for you... creators, marketers, small businesses, brands, and anyone using LinkedIn to share their voice for economic opportunities. Here's why: 🔍 Low Supply, High Demand: As seen with the early days of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, there’s often a gap between people using a new feature or format and those who are consuming it. This is the case with LinkedIn video today. There's a small pool of people sharing videos versus those not, giving those who do share video less competition for attention. 🚀 LinkedIn Is Prioritizing Video: Perhaps the biggest reason... LinkedIn is prioritizing it. In addition to adding more ways for videos to surface compared to other formats, users who share video content are being rewarded. There are a lot of people reporting that they're receiving hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of impressions on their videos. 📊 Broader Video Trends: Video has become one of the key ways we consume content, whether for entertainment, education, or inspiration. Short-form video, in particular, has become the go-to. And it’s not just younger generations—over 75% of U.S. adults spend up to two hours daily watching short-form videos. There are other reasons to invest in LinkedIn video—thinking about my own business, here’s what I see: 💼 Getting Clients: Video is a great way to showcase your insights and expertise. When people can see and hear you, they have a better idea of what it might be like to work with you. 📈 Sponsored Content: Influencer marketing on LinkedIn is growing. Video is one of the most popular formats for sponsored content in general, and with 80% of B2B buyers saying short-form video content from influencers is the most trusted, video is key if you want to attract more brand partners and drive the outcomes they want. 🎤 Speaking Opportunities: Posting “talking head” videos or repurposing past speaking engagements helps demonstrate the value you can bring to events. This makes it easier for event organizers to see how you can communicate your knowledge, experience, etc., and makes you top of mind when it comes to speaking opportunities. How's LinkedIn video been for you?

A few years ago, hitting ₹400–500 Cr ARR for a food brand without offline distribution sounded impossible. Today, with quick commerce and e-commerce, it’s happening - fast. Here’s why that’s such a shift 👇 Food runs on low gross margins (mostly <45%) and low AOVs. You don’t win on the first purchase - you win on frequency. It’s all about LTV, not CAC. Compare that to skincare: 75% gross margins mean you can make money on the first order if your CM1/CAC > 1. Totally different economics. That’s why traditional D2C in food was tough. Consumers don’t want to build five separate baskets across five different websites for everyday essentials. And yet, going GT (general trade) early is brutal for new-age brands - expensive, slow, and hard to drive offtake. TV spends? Mostly wasted if your distribution isn’t deep enough to convert awareness into sales. That’s where quick commerce changed the game. - Efficient marketing - Instant availability - 100+ city reach - Real-time data on what’s working and where At Open Secret, we’ve seen this play out firsthand we’ve grown 3.5X on quick commerce, profitably, in just the last 6 months. #Quickcommerce isn’t the end state - no big brand in India is built without #offline scale. But it’s the smartest launchpad we’ve seen — giving brands both smart scale and data-driven insights on where to go deeper offline. I’m curious - what’s your shopping behavior like? Do you buy more from GT, MT, quick commerce, or e-commerce these days?

We are solving for Loneliness, not just Sales. Marketers often assume people watch TikTok Lives solely for the discounts. We assume the motivation is purely transactional. The research paints a different picture. I've been reading studies on "Key Reasons Viewers Tune In", and the top drivers are deeply human: 𝟏. 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 People crave belonging. In a digital world that often feels isolating, a Live Stream offers immediate, real-time companionship. The viewer is hanging out with their community united by a liking for the host, the brand or just being part of the livestream. 𝟐. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 "𝐔𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝" We have reached "Peak Polish" on social media. Everything is edited, filtered, and curated. Live Streaming offers the antidote: Spontaneity. Viewers tune in specifically because anything can happen. They value the mistakes, the pauses, and the raw moments more than the script. 𝟑. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐩𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐩 The platform is engineered for interaction. When a host reads a comment or acknowledges a gift, the viewer gets a hit of dopamine. It transforms "Passive Consumption" (watching TV) into "Active Participation" (playing a game). 𝟒. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐝𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐨 "𝐀𝐈 𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐩" In 2026, we are drowning in AI generated content. Live Streaming has become the "Human Verification" layer of the internet. When a host stutters, drops a product, or laughs at a bad joke, it proves they aren't a bot. The "messiness" of Live is proof that it is authentic and run by a real person. If you treat your Live Stream like a TV commercial, you will fail. You must treat it like a conversation. Success comes when you stop "broadcasting" to an audience and start "building" a community. When you watch a Live Stream, do you stay for the Product or the Host? #ConsumerPsychology #DigitalMarketing #CommunityBuilding #TikTokLive #MarketingInsights #LiveSelling

Video consumption on LinkedIn has exploded, with uploads increasing 𝟰𝟱% 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿 and short-form content growing twice as fast as other formats. Therefore, now is the perfect time to incorporate video into your LinkedIn marketing strategy. According to Sprout Social, Inc.'s 2024 Content Strategy Report, short-form videos under 30 seconds generate the highest engagement, with 66% of consumers ranking them as the most engaging in-feed content type. This aligns perfectly with the platform's push towards vertical video formats similar to TikTok and Instagram Reels. LinkedIn offers three primary video formats: 1. 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 - Posted directly to your feed, these videos are ideal for brand awareness, thought leadership and audience education. Short videos perform best, especially with a strong opening hook and a straightforward call to action. 2. 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲—This format enables the broadcasting of live video content for virtual events like panels, Q&AS, announcements, or product launches. It creates direct connections with your audience and generates, on average, 23 times more comments than regular videos. 3. 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝗔𝗱𝘀 - These paid posts appear in users' feeds based on your targeting parameters. You can filter by job title, company, industry and other criteria to reach decision-makers effectively. LinkedIn reports that audiences are two to three times more likely to associate positive traits with a brand after seeing its LinkedIn ads. 4. 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 - LinkedIn's answer to TikTok-style content: full-screen, vertical videos that are short, scrollable and designed for discovery on both desktop and mobile. This feature is still being tested and is unavailable to all users. Focus on "edutainment" content for maximum impact—entertaining educational videos that explain your products or services through storytelling and visuals. Remember that 79% of LinkedIn videos are watched with sound off, so captions are essential. With four out of five LinkedIn members involved in business decisions and possessing twice the buying power of average online audiences, video content offers unparalleled access to decision-makers in a professional context. Sprout Social's LinkedIn integration makes managing this video strategy seamless. It allows you to schedule content, track performance metrics, and optimise your approach across multiple channels—all from one platform. https://lnkd.in/dMNnK2yc

⚠️ The Internet has moved from the age of distribution to the age of engagement and most brands haven’t caught up. In the distribution era, followers were king. Post consistently, grow your audience steadily, monetize predictably. But now? Your “For You” feed tells the real story. You’re seeing content from people you don’t follow, because the algorithm doesn’t care about your follower graph anymore. This is the TikTok effect at play. For the first time, a platform prioritized individual pieces of content, not network size. And it worked. So now everyone follows suit: → Instagram Reels → YouTube Shorts → X/Twitter’s For You feed Today, a small account with 97 followers can outpace a 100K account simply because they posted something that clicked. In this new model, followers don’t guarantee reach. Your engagement signals does. Content resonance does. And brands and creators need to adapt. Stop chasing followers. Start chasing relevance. We’re not in a follower economy anymore. We’re in a content performance economy. Curious how this changes content strategy and why link posts are getting buried across platforms? That’s a whole other story… (Should I write about that next?) #marketing #socialmedia

The first time I cried in a movie theater was when I saw "The Joy Luck Club". My high school Asian club went to see the movie as a group, and I remember so clearly that, for the first time, I saw not only a story that I could relate to, but a story that I could relate to because I saw *myself* in that story, as an Asian American woman. That's why I'm always going to fight so hard for representation. It matters. Today's news highlights just that (especially for people who are waiting to hear "the business case" for diversity, equity and inclusion). Because, beginning in 2021, the consulting firm McKinsey has published a series of reports exploring the entertainment industry’s representation and inclusion of historically excluded people. Along the way, the analysts totaled up the potential financial revenue that Hollywood could stand to gain if it adopted more culturally inclusive business solutions: $10 billion per year from closing the Black inequity gap, an eye-popping $12 billion to $18 billion from properly valuing Latino professionals and consumers, and — in the latest report released today — $2 billion to $4.4 billion from more effectively tapping the Asian and Pacific Islander market. That's $30 billion dollars being left on the table. Some parts from today's report that stood out to me, thanks to the Hollywood Reporter article covering this, include: 💡 Although API representation in film leapt from 3 to 20 percent in the 20 years between 2002 and 2022, 85 percent of that recent representation is in movies produced outside the United States, and episodic television has seen similar trends. AAPIs (6.2 percent of the U.S. population) are still underrepresented by 50 percent in content made in their own country (3.4 percent of lead roles in U.S.-produced films), which means that the API faces seen onscreen do not necessarily reflect the experiences and perspectives of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders living here. 💡 Nearly half of wide release features with API leads are action/adventure movies (for films that grossed more than $50 million, that figure rises to 71 percent), and movies with API leads tend to be increasingly race-agnostic (as opposed to having narratives specific to an API cultural experience) the more widely they are distributed. 💡Disaggregating representation data – by genre, by producing country, by qualitative analysis – is particularly crucial for the umbrella identity known as API, which tends to obscure or outright erase the Pasifika (Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) part of the moniker. Half of the 310 API lead roles in movies from 2018 and 2022 were played by actors of East Asian descent; the 17 Pasifika leads in those five years were played by just five men, who were mostly in action movies and who were mostly Dwayne Johnson and Jason Momoa. Full article and report linked in comments. Would love to hear your thoughts on this as well. #AANHPI #representation #matters