Short-Form Video: Shoot It Short, Shoot It Vertical, Put Yourself in It

Ask a racer what content a sponsor wants and you'll usually hear "a good highlight video." Then they spend a weekend editing a three-minute montage set to music, post it, and watch it go nowhere. The people who make video for a living at my Sponsorship Summits describe a very different job: clips measured in seconds, shot vertically on a phone, with a human being in the frame. Here is what they said works.

Shorter than you think

Megan Meyer, the NHRA champion who coaches racers on social media, told the Off-Road Sponsorship Summit that length is the first thing to cut. "As far as duration goes, the shorter the better," she said. Reels can run 90 seconds, "but again, if you can get something that's like eight to 10 seconds, it's more likely to get more views, especially if you post a longer caption with it."

The caption part is a trick worth knowing. When a viewer taps to read a long caption, the platform lays the text over the video while it keeps playing. "So the longer it takes you to read that caption, the more plays the video is getting," Meyer said. "Social media is all about testing things out." ▶ Watch Megan Meyer explain this

Patrick Wagenbrenner, marketing communications director at Randy's Worldwide, runs brand accounts with audiences in the hundreds of thousands and lands in the same place. "I would never post anything on Instagram longer than 20 seconds, and usually your sweet spot is in that 9 to 15 second range. If you haven't sold everything you're going to sell somebody in 10 seconds on Instagram, you've already lost them." Retention, he added, is now one of the biggest signals the Meta platforms use to decide how far a reel gets pushed. ▶ Watch Patrick Wagenbrenner on the summit panel

Shoot vertical, and the phone is fine

Hold your phone the way your audience holds theirs. "I recommend staying away from posting horizontal videos on social media," Meyer said. YouTube can handle it and Facebook is okay, but "Instagram, it's a no. And the reason why you want vertical is because if you look at your phone, you look at it long ways, and so you want the post to take up the whole real estate on your screen." A horizontal clip fills about a third of the screen, and most people scroll right past it.

You don't need a cinema camera either. "1080 is perfect for social media," she said, and "75% of it is just what I film on my phone." ▶ See the full answer

Wagenbrenner has worked with brands that keep full-time media crews and high-end cameras, and he respects what that gear does for print, commercials and long-form video. For short-form, though, he jokes, "I'm not a photographer. I'm an idiot with a cell phone." One recent example: he walked around a freshly fitted Lexus GX at the office, shot a 15-second clip, added music and posted it to a brand page with about 150,000 followers. It passed 600,000 views. He has also watched a nine-second clip of a car rolling through a parking lot pull tens of millions of plays. His rule for anyone who promises otherwise: "If somebody comes and says, 'We can create you a viral video,' run, because nobody knows what that means." He suggests a feed that leans about 75 percent reels to 25 percent stills. ▶ Watch the session

Put a person in the frame

Racers love car footage. Sponsors outside the sport often can't tell one clip from the next. Kelsey, a longtime Formula Drift driver, told the Drift Sponsorship Summit about a partner who looked at her media and said: "Hey look, all these photos are great, but they all look the same." To someone who isn't steeped in drifting, "they don't know which track is which. They just see the car drifting with a bunch of smoke."

Her conclusion: "They want to see more of you, more of your personality, because at the end of the day you are the brand ambassador, and they're partnering with a brand ambassador, an influencer. They're not partnering with the car."

Personality also beats production. Kelsey pays track photographers and videographers but edits everything herself, and admits she sometimes loses hours polishing a clip "when some of my best videos have literally just been a few clips thrown together." One of her top reels was a green-screen gag: she told a dad joke, stepped aside, and revealed a photo of herself cradling a coilover like a baby. "I literally just told a joke and it did great. That's one of my best performing reels, just simply because it's authentic, it's silly, it's organic." No crew at the track? Hand a friend your phone, she said, and have them shoot vertical video. ▶ Watch Kelsey on the drift panel

Cast more lines

Jack Korpela of Cycle Drag has built a large audience covering motorcycle drag racing, and he doesn't claim to know in advance which clip will hit. "We're fishing, and the more times we cast that line out there, the more chances you have to catch a big fish," he told the Motorcycle Racing Sponsorship Summit. "I posted a lot of videos. Some of them didn't do so well, some of them got over a million views."

He also adjusts to what each platform wants this season, even when it goes against his habits. YouTube has been asking for live vertical video, and he prefers horizontal. At a motorcycle festival he tried it anyway: "I said, what the heck, let me do this. It's what it wants. Views were through the roof." His advice: "Find out what is the next new hottest thing, what does that platform want, and give it to it." ▶ Watch Jack Korpela

Old footage counts too. Korpela's interview in Jay Leno's garage earned about 300,000 views on YouTube. Eight months later, out of fresh winter content, he cut it down to five minutes around one funny comment, retitled it, and watched it climb to 3.2 million views. Same footage, new framing.

Let long-form do a different job

Short clips win the scroll. Longer video builds a following that sticks. Meyer calls YouTube "not really a social media platform. It's more of a search engine," which is why her long-form videos keep collecting views years after they go up. Her routine is a roughly three-minute video for YouTube, plus a 15- to 30-second highlight posted a few days earlier on Instagram or Facebook telling followers the full video is coming. ▶ Watch the Meet the Sponsors interview

Heath Cofran of Alpinestars pointed motocross racers to riders like Justin Barcia and Axell Hodges. "Don't forget about YouTube. YouTube is another very powerful platform that we look at and see what our rider is doing there," he said. "It's basically their own private TV show that if you're a follower of Axell Hodges or Justin Barcia, you want to see what they're doing at their ranch and their training and all the silly stuff." ▶ Watch Heath Cofran on this

And nothing has to be made twice. Meyer saves the reels she posts on Instagram and Facebook and uploads them as YouTube Shorts every day. "That's literally all I do," she said, and that habit alone had her channel approaching 2,000 followers within a couple of months. ▶ Watch the clip

The takeaway

• Aim for 8 to 15 seconds on reels and shorts, and get to the point in the first few.
• Shoot vertical at 1080 on your phone. Save the expensive crew for commercials and long-form.
• Get your face and personality in the frame. A sponsor is partnering with you, not the car.
• Post more and let the audience pick the winners. Reuse your best footage with a new edit and a new title.
• Use YouTube for longer behind-the-scenes episodes, and repost your short clips there as Shorts.