This article was written for Muse by John Stapleton. Read the full article here.

For brands to continue to make ads, they need to adapt to a new model

Thanks to incredible technological advancements and enormous new media fragmentation, technology has completely blown apart and disrupted everything we knew about making high-quality commercials. Covid-19 accelerated this disruption even more by letting brands accept a more nimble and "good enough" approach. It literally forced fewer people to make the same exact thing in shorter amounts of time.

Why so many people and so much time? It's all built on a model that's been around since the mid-1900s: a model built for 90-minute feature lengths, very heavy equipment and gear, months of time, and multiple experts at every task. It doesn't stop with filming. Postproduction follows suit with elaborate comfy edit suites, tons of time, and crazy-expensive hardware and software. All catered to the almighty "big" screen. 

But aren't screens getting smaller? Even before Covid, most people gave up the big screen for good as their 65-inch 4K flatscreen proved a better experience. People are also gravitating to longer episodic experiences to binge on their own time throughout their own busy lives, while Gen Z (and soon Gen Alpha) are going to even smaller screens and watching all their media from the privacy of their own pocket. In the U.S. alone, we spend an average of 323 minutes a week watching videos on our phones. This is a trend that's growing, and the industry needs to get out of its own way and adjust to it.