Start Me Up! A profile of 87 seconds

Are you using video in your business content and SEO strategy? If not, you may be missing out on organic search, as well as ecommerce ROI.

Luckily startup 87 seconds is here to help you inform, pitch, sell, and explain your business through video.

By Ryan Sommer April 11th 2013 12:22

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, but it’s very noisy, so your video content needs to look professional, and you need to figure out how to best label and tag with the available tools.

We spoke with the recently launched 87 seconds (the name is taken from research showing this is the amount of time a typical viewier attention span is online) to understand more about their business proposition of high quality explainer videos at affordable prices.

In one sentence, what is 87 seconds?

87 seconds is an online platform to create explanation videos for corporate communications.

What problem(s) does 87 seconds solve?

While trying to make a video ourself, we realised how much of the current market offering is a mess. We had a tough time finding qualified agencies, and once found they seemed really expensive. So instead we worked with a freelancer, which wasn’t much better an option cost-wise. Then we ended up ordering pizzas and sitting next to the designers for 3 days…:)

That’s exactly how the market remains today. If you are looking for a motion design videos, you have two choices :

1) Ask your marketing agency, which will make it bloody expensive. Your project will be handled through the usual creative process of commercial, account, creative, designer, journalist, post prod etc.

2) Ask a freelance designer. He will certainly make it at a lower cost, but might be missing some critical skills for your project, such as finding the right voice over, music, understanding your business model, building a whole environment around your brand…

87seconds has been set up to solve these issues with a dedicated process for short – corporate animation. We do it both : at a low cost, and top notch quality!

What are your immediate goals?

First to revolutionize the way we create short animation videos thanks to our online collaboration tool, second to create kickass videos for our clients.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building 87 seconds?

Arriving at the number 87 seconds! It took us a ton of lab research on corporate communication standards. Before actually incorporating, we worked for one year on benchmarking the industry and studying best practices.

At the end 87 seconds is both:

1) A piece of advice we give our clients. People tend to communicate with long messages actually killing their pitch. Being focused on your product makes pitching easier. 87 seconds is an elevator pitch for getting your audience on board !

2) A promise we make our clients. People spend about 4-5 seconds on a static page online. By dynamising their web page with a video we are able to shoot this figure to 87 seconds. By that time the viewer has understood your service / company and converts into a lead.