Last year, at SXSW, YouTube solicited short-form book adaptations several top creative agencies in order to pitch its then-nascent six-second ads — known as “bumper ads” — to brands. One year later, a significant number of advertisers have adopted bumpers, so YouTube is using its latest appearance at SXSW to promote a healthy and balanced pre-roll diet. The video site has once again enlisted agencies to create six-second spots, but this time, it is also asking those partners to create 15-second and long-form content as well.
As it did at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, YouTube is asking its SXSW partners to create pithy adaptations of fairy tales. The spots YouTube showed off at Sundance were all six seconds long, and those videos will show up in Austin as well. There, they’ll be joined by 15-second versions of the same fairy tales, as well as longer clips of variable length (typically about 80 seconds).
Through this assembly of videos, YouTube will show brands that stories can be told across multiple formats. Adweek has shared some of the agency-produced fairy tales that will premiere at SXSW, including The Richards Group‘s version of Rumplestiltskin (pictured above) and 72andSunny Sydney‘s sly take on Goldilocks, which imagines a home security company operated by the three bears.
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“How might you think about using all those formats and using them in a way so they collect together and build a bigger story too?” said Google head of creative agency development Sadie Thoma. “That’s a conversation we’re having in general with the brands and agencies we partner with—if these are the core formats that are sort of out there for sight, sound and motion, how do you think about them and how do you have them work together to tell the broader stories you want to tell?”
The 2018 edition of SXSW Interactive begins on March 9 and runs through the 13th.
