How we lost the war on vertical video

Vertical video doesn’t make sense. Or, well, it didn’t. It still sort of doesn’t, but it makes more sense than it used to. 
Okay, let me start over. 

When I started my career in media production, vertical video was a punchline. The first angry comment on every video was, “Turn your phone sideways.” Our entire media infrastructure was built around videos in landscape orientation, after all–good, old-fashioned, horizontal frames. 

But why was this the default orientation, anyway? 

Well, there are some boring logistical reasons for it. But on a fundamental level, the landscape style frame–what all our TVs and cinema screens and computers display–is set up to replicate your eyes’ field of vision. At its core, it’s that simple: our eyes basically see in widescreen, so video should be in widescreen. Case closed. 

Enter the smartphone. How do you solve for a device that’s designed to be held perpendicular to what we’re all used to? For Steve Jobs, the answer was simple: flip the whole thing 90 degrees. 

Here’s Jobs showing off video on the original iPhone for the first time. “All videos,” he says, almost flippantly, “we look at in landscape.” CASE CLOSED. 

 And then, the moment the app store expanded and smartphone usage exploded, the case was reopened almost immediately.

 2011: Snapchat launches and—without realizing it—kickstarts the vertical video era.

2016: Facebook moves toward a slightly elongated 2:3 native format, Instagram launches Stories to take on Snapchat, and a little app called Douyin appears in China.

2017: Douyin goes global under a new name—TikTok.

2018: TikTok merges with Musical.ly, bringing lip-syncs and dance trends to the masses. A study finds vertical videos keep people watching 90% more than horizontal. 

2019: TikTok crosses 1 billion downloads. 

2020: Instagram introduces Reels—aka its answer to TikTok.

2021: YouTube throws its hat in the ring with Shorts. The competition heats up.

2022–Now: Meta prioritizes full-screen content, and Instagram makes all videos Reels. No turning back now.

We all had arguments against vertical video. It looks weird on computer screens. It doesn’t capture as much of the action. It’s harder to edit. None of it really mattered. Because at the end of the day, people just don’t want to turn their phone 90 degrees to the side. 

 So what are the rules? When do we shoot in portrait mode, and when do we stick to landscape? There are basically three situations that we never use vertical video.

1) Anything with a major call to action. You may be enticed by that famous stat  that says vertical video gets a retention rate of over 90%. Unfortunately, this doesn’t transpose to clickthrough rates. If you want to get a ot of eyeballs, go for the reel. If you want those eyeballs to follow through and do something...not so much.

2) Any piece of video infrastructure. Basically, if something is on a webpage you own–it should not be a portrait-mode video.

3) Email embeds. It makes for a lot more scrolling, and you ideally want somebody to consume that content on a computer regardless.