Clip it good: How marketers are making experiences worth clipping

You might not watch an entire 72-hour live stream. But you might watch clips of it.

That’s something TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago’s Skittles team understood when planning a content strategy around a recent effort involving the “Skittles Gaming Flute,” a branded flute video game controller. The candy brand sent the controller to gamers who then livestreamed themselves learning how to play the instrument-come-controller over the course of a weekend in March. One streamer, PointCrow, even conducted a marathon stream that stretched over multiple days.

As the livestreams continued on, the team reviewed the footage in real time, picking out segments to clip and highlight on Skittles’s social channels.

“You look at politics and sports, it’s how a lot of people consume,” Brian Culp, group creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago, told Marketing Brew. “So, man, if we can make brand experiences that are worth sharing like that—then it’s how a lot of people are going to experience it.”

Clipping, which refers to taking short bites of content and distributing it across the internet, has become a common practice that mainstream marketers like Skittles are dabbling in. The process is, according to Forbes, already used by fintech and crypto brands to promote their founders.

Some brands are considering clippable output when concepting creative content strategies. Last fall, Kendall Tucker, head of creative experimentation at the B2B expense management platform Ramp, told us the company realized that one camera wouldn’t provide enough clippable content for a planned seven-hour livestream with The Office star Brian Baumgartner, so the company ended up using five dedicated cameras for more interesting and varied clips.

Slicing and dicing a lengthy livestream into dozens or even hundreds of clips that post across as many accounts is just one approach as brands venture into clipping. The goal is often to generate buzz and attention, and it comes amid a rush of AI-generated content and bot farms that can generate manufactured discourse for just about everything under the sun (maybe even the latest hot indie band.)

Whether that will translate into real appreciation is another story—but many marketers are betting that it will help them stand out in an ever-crowded digital landscape.

“A lot of brands that are getting involved in clipping today…are either being very forward-thinking and really trying to push the needle and be some of the more innovative brands,” said Jason Wilhelm, president and co-founder of the entertainment company Fixated, which works with creators and facilitates clipping content creation. “And a lot of brands are just dipping their toes in the water and seeing how this works.”

“Create viral moments”

Wilhelm told us he sees the rise of clipping as a natural evolution of “the art of virality,” with brands trying to “manufacture and create virality” by recognizing and replicating what’s already worked for creators and streamers.

Fixated, which works with creators, has established a dedicated clipping business, called the Clipping Hall of Fame, which offers payment to users in exchange for clipping creator interviews and events. It also operates an in-house content team and meme pages (including the Internet Hall of Fame, which has 4 million followers on X), which it uses to distribute said clips. Wilhelm told us that about six to eight months ago, the agency started getting calls from brands looking to emulate creators’ strategies. The company has worked with Warner Music as well as several big video game companies, per Wilhelm.

Fixated works with brands to create campaigns either using existing brand content or create something new with creators that’s produced in a way “that’s very organically viral,” Wilhelm said. In either case, he explained, “We will then take those pieces of content, or that campaign that we did with a bunch of creators, and then we will create a campaign via all of our clipping infrastructure and post that.”

The next step is for clippers, who get paid on a CPM basis, to go in and start clipping up the content directly. “The content is going to whatever platforms the brand has told us they want the content to be posted on,” Wilhelm explained. “Some brands prefer TikTok, some prefer Instagram, some prefer YouTube Shorts, some prefer Twitter… some prefer all of them, right? And they just want as many views as humanly possible.”

Content matters

It might seem like clipping is more about a “distribution strategy” than anything else, but it’s more complicated than that, Fabiana Maldonado, senior strategist at Rapp, noted. For marketers considering a clipping strategy, it’s not just a matter of taking just any content a brand creates and spreading clips of it across the internet far and wide; instead, marketers are tasked with thinking about the kinds of content people watch organically online.

Shane Ginsberg, founder and CEO of Street Poller Media, a company that creates content for brands like Polymarket and Moonpay based on man-on-the-street-style interviews, believes the success of clipping comes not from perfecting the medium but the content itself.

“The content that you’re clipping really matters,” Ginsberg said. “Having high-quality content, and then high-quality, good editors, and then, again, good distribution matters. If you’re a brand or a business owner and you’re just getting started, then clipping probably doesn’t make sense, because clipping is a massive awareness play.”

It can also cost a pretty penny: Ginsberg estimates that the cost of a clipping campaign for a brand can start anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 “if you want to do it right.”

Beyond that, marketers should have a good understanding of the infrastructure required to get into clipping, Ginsberg noted, as brands will likely need to work with editors to create the clips as well as have the distribution ready to go. The editors are particularly important: “They have to be in tune with the trends,” Ginsberg said. “[They] also have to have a creative brain.”

As brands start to test the waters, clipped content could further infiltrate social media feeds, whether it’s coming from creators or from brands making and cutting down long-form content, Douglas Brundage, founder of brand consultancy Kingsland, said. But like most internet content frames, it’ll only last as long as it’s rewarded.

“It’s in the hands of the platforms,” Brundage told us. “If they change what they’re incentivizing, it could go [away].”