Write the six seconds first

The Ramadan film gets written this month, and it gets written at ninety seconds.

Almost nobody will watch ninety seconds of it.

They will meet it on a phone, held one-handed, somewhere between two other things, with a skip button that goes live after five. Whatever the idea is, it has to have already happened by then. Six seconds is the honest unit. The ninety-second version is the one the room approves.

I have watched this run in the wrong order for years. The team writes the film, falls in love with the film, and then sends the edit an instruction that is really an apology: cut it down for social. So the short version becomes a trailer for something the viewer will never see. A face, a logo, a line that only lands if you watched the part that was taken out. Offcuts of a long film, running as the main advertising.

Turn it round. Write the six seconds first, on its own, as the whole piece of work. If it cannot stand at six, the length was never the problem. Then let the ninety grow out of it, with the six sitting inside it, so the long version is a longer look at something the short one already said.

From the platform side I have watched what actually accumulates in a month like the one coming. The version with almost all of the impressions behind it is rarely the version the brand thinks of as the ad. It is the cutdown, running at the frequency the budget bought, in front of a market where every category is bidding for the same evening at once.

So the argument that arrives later, about why the film did not travel, has the wrong subject. It travelled. It travelled in a form nobody wrote.

Six seconds is not a constraint on the work. On this month's audience, it is the work.