Article by Kelly Moses, Brand Experience & Communications Manager at Juno Media and member of the IAB SA Branded Entertainment & Content Marketing Committee
Kelly Moses, Brand Experience & Communications Manager at Juno Media
There’s a temptation to treat the content conversation as a versus: short-form or long-form, reach or depth, snackable or substantial. But the IAB South Africa 2025 branded content survey tells a different story worth paying attention to: these formats aren’t competing, they’re working together.
When asked which formats are most relevant to their brands and clients, respondents didn’t pick a side. Short-form video came out on top with 82 mentions, but long-form video followed closely at 74, and articles and blogs held their own at 67. The most common combination people reported using was short-form and long-form video, together.
IAB South Africa 2025: Formats most relevant to brands and clients
That pairing isn’t an accident. It reflects how audiences actually move through content now. One respondent put it simply: “Snackable first, deep-dive second.” Another noted that short-form drives engagement while long-form still builds trust. The formats do different jobs: short-form earns the attention, long-form earns the relationship.
IAB South Africa 2025: Effectiveness is driven by genuine moments of connection
This matters because the research also reveals a tension. Reach remains the top objective for branded content, well ahead of engagement. Yet respondents ranked authenticity, storytelling and value as what actually makes content work, qualities that need room and time to land, where longer formats and podcasts, now the third most-used channel, come in.
IAB South Africa 2025: Authentic storytelling with value is viewed as best practice
So the question for marketers and publishers isn’t which format to back. It’s how to build a system where the two feed each other. In practice, that means treating short-form as the front door, not the whole house: a clip earns the first few seconds, then points somewhere with room to breathe, a podcast, a longer video, an article that answers the question the clip raised. The long-form piece does the convincing. The short-form cutdowns, drawn from that same asset, pulls the next person in. One shoot, one idea, many touchpoints.
That approach also eases the biggest pain point in the research. Resourcing and content saturation were named as the top challenges, and the survey’s own conclusion was blunt: the answer is fewer, better content pieces, not more.
The brands that get this right won’t be the ones making the most content. They’ll be the ones making it work harder.