There are trailers and teaser trailers, and then there are teasers for teaser trailers. You’ve seen them all over the place. They’re typically between 5 and 10 seconds in length, and studios use them on social media as precursors to big trailer reveals. Why are there so many? What does this mean for the future of movie marketing? According to a movie studio exec, the answer to both involves — wouldn’t you know it — Millennials.

Grey Munford, CBS Films’ senior vice president of communications, took to Twitter on Friday to clear up “some confusion” surrounding these trailer teases.

[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/greymunford/status/730999261609922560[/EMBED_TWITTER]

 


Alex Billington of First Showing pressed him further and Munford wrote back with more info:

[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/greymunford/status/731003460917723136[/EMBED_TWITTER]

 

[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/greymunford/status/731007978648653824[/EMBED_TWITTER]

In short, it looks like we’ll be seeing more of these short videos in the months and years ahead in order to hit the social media crowds.


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Image via Warner Bros.

According to Facebook’s own introduction to navigating video metrics for businesses, “a ‘video view’ is defined as a view of three seconds or more and will appear for all videos, including those that come to life as people scroll through News Feed.” The platform also tracks how many times users watch videos for 10 seconds or more.

Recent examples of these trailer teasers were used for Ben Affleck’s The Accountant over at Warner Bros., Sony’s The Inferno with Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Out of the Shadows from Paramount. The Marvel and DC marketing teams, too, have long used them for those first trailer debuts to tantalize viewers with the first minute seconds of footage.

You can’t put the entirety of the blame on Millennials, though. When it comes to the Internet, we’re all just a bunch of ADD-prone, borderline manic Web surfers. At least Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool was smart enough to laugh at the whole practice.


tom-hanks-babett-knudsen-inferno-movie
Image via Columbia Pictures
teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-2-out-of-the-shadows-movie-image
Image via Paramount Pictures