How The ‘Pivot To Video’ Is Transforming The Job Market

If you’re still stumbling around in search of a career path (or just a job), grab a camera.

On July 20, Vice Media laid off 2 percent of its workforce — but “will hire staff for increased video production,” as Variety first reported, citing “a source familiar with the situation.” Less than a month earlier, MTV suffered a wave of layoffs while “shifting resources to short-form video content more in line with young people’s media consumption habits,” a spokesperson told Billboard. And just two weeks before that, the site Vocativ had its own round of layoffs, declaring in a statement that the site is — you guessed it — “undertaking a strategic shift to focus exclusively on video content.”

Such restructuring is often attributed to the much-heralded “pivot to video” taking hold of the media industry, not to mention everyone’s social network homepages.

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And it’s not just journalism. Experts across media career areas point to video as the medium of the future, and college students and recent grads may want to take note.

The numbers don’t lie. According to data from the recruiting software company Jobvite, the portion of media-industry hires with the words “film,” “producer” or “video” in their titles rose continuously between 2014 and 2017, from 9.7 percent to 12.6 percent.

“I can’t tell you about a pivot,” Julie Hartenstein, the Columbia Journalism School’s associate dean of career development, told International Business Times. But at the school’s annual spring career fair, which included 141 recruiters this year, she noted, “There was definitely an increase in the number of companies that are looking for people with video reporting and production skills.”

Although Hartenstein emphasized that the sample size was small, she estimated that the number of recruiting firms and organizations that listed video capabilities as a sought-out skill set rose to about 68 percent this year from around 55 percent among recruiters at 2016’s expo.

The supply side of the media industry labor market is working to keep up. Mel White, an assistant professor of advertising at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, pointed out that every student at Newhouse must take a course in multimedia storytelling, which includes video instruction. This year, White herself began requiring all of her students to include a video advertisement in their senior project portfolios. The previous year, a video piece was optional.

“When ad agencies see their portfolios, it’s helpful to have a video in there,” she said, adding that video is “definitely” becoming a staple skill for job-seekers in the creative ad industry, because it sheds light on the grad’s ability to tell an engaging story. “For students studying creative advertising, it’s important that they learn storytelling and longer-format videos that are interesting and have the potential to be shared.”

The entertainment world, meanwhile, is fully stocked with would-be filmmakers. But a skyrocketing number of students are seeking to graduate with video skills, as they're becoming aware of heightened demand across various corners of the job market, said Tom Nunan, a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theatre, Film and Television.

“Kids who graduate from film school may not want to be the next Quentin Tarantino or Ava DuVernay, but they have so many opportunities in other industries,” he said, citing the use of virtual tours in real estate marketing as one example. “The demand is just so high for video.”

Nunan highlighted the medium’s distinctly millennial flavor.

“I just personally find it interesting that with my students, and millennial students specifically, I can’t get them to read anything,” he said. “But I can get them to watch just about everything.”

Craig Huber, a media analyst at Huber Research Partners, which focuses on the media and internet stocks, posited that the so-called “pivot” is not only a recent phenomenon, but is likely to be a lasting one.

“I absolutely don’t think this is a bubble,” he said of the ballooning preference for video content. “I’ve been talking about this for 20 years. I think the effort is just going to keep picking up the pace.”

The reason, he said, is “partly because advertisers are demanding it and partly because they’re more effective ads.” That, and today’s media consumers “are spending more and more time watching videos on their mobile phones and computers.”

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Although there’s a debate about whether the preferences of consumers of media — particularly video-loving millennial consumers of media — are driving the trend, as opposed to revenue-hungry advertisers alone, the data speaks for itself.

Web-surfers can’t fail to notice the in-your-face, eye-catching nature of short online videos. But according to the mobile and web analytics company Heap, which counts the Atlantic, the Skimm and advertising firm AdRoll among its clients, users who watch videos on media sites are, on average, 28.7 times more likely to return to those same sites the next day and 12.6 times more likely to return within the following four days.

The importance of video skills, according to White, the Newhouse professor, has grown substantially in the creative marketing world as a result of the success of one- to five-minute branded web videos. And even with shorter, so-called “pre-roll” spots, which viewers have to sit through before getting to the show or clip they originally clicked on, when they’re given the chance to skip such ads after the first five seconds, they sometimes choose to stick around, she added.

Either way, White said, in advertising, visuals are “easier to process” and “don’t require decoding,” making them more digestible.

Still, Hartenstein, the Columbia associate dean, stressed that text isn’t going away for good, at least in what tends to be portrayed as the most vulnerable sect of the media industry — journalism.

“Of our students that landed [jobs], the majority are still doing text primarily,” she said. “Employers are not abandoning text and reporting skills as their primary focus in recruiting candidates.”