Why Everyone’s Suddenly Making Silly Short Videos (Even Serious Brands)

Scroll through social media for thirty seconds and you’ll likely see it: an accountancy firm doing a trending dance transition, a law firm posting a slightly absurd behind-the-scenes clip, a serious B2B software company suddenly finding its “fun voice.” A few years ago, this would have looked like a brand having a breakdown. Now, it looks like a brand doing its job properly.

The numbers explain why. 91% of businesses are now actively using video as a marketing tool, and short-form specifically has become the format marketers trust most — it has been ranked the number one ROI format for three consecutive years, with videos under 60 seconds generating 2.5 times more engagement per impression than any other content type. When a format consistently outperforms everything else on the table, even the most buttoned-up businesses eventually have to try it.

The audience behind this shift is younger and less patient than the audience marketers used to write for. Around 90% of Gen Z and Millennial users now watch short-form video daily across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and crucially, 84% of consumers actively say they want to see more video from brands, not less. This isn’t a niche audience anymore — it’s simply where attention now lives.

So why the deliberately silly, low-production tone specifically, rather than a polished corporate video? Because slick, obviously-scripted content reads as an advert, and people scroll straight past adverts. A slightly rough, funny, human clip reads as content, and content gets watched. 85% of consumers say they’ve been persuaded to buy something after watching a video, and that persuasion tends to work best when it doesn’t feel like persuasion at all.

There’s a genuine strategic discipline behind the apparent silliness too. Marketers increasingly treat short-form video as a repeatable product rather than a one-off post, and 71% believe videos in the 30-second to 2-minute range perform best. The best-performing brands aren’t improvising a joke and hoping — they’re running a deliberate pipeline: record raw footage, cut it into several short variants, publish consistently, and repeat whatever format proves to land with their specific audience.

The honest complication is that this approach doesn’t suit every brand or every message equally well. AI-generated video tools now handle a growing share of quick social clips, but still fall notably short on content requiring genuine emotional nuance, and a joke that works brilliantly for one audience can misfire badly with another — particularly in more conservative or highly regulated industries, where the wrong tone can do real reputational damage rather than simply falling flat.

The practical takeaway isn’t “start being funny online regardless of who you are.” It’s that short, honest, slightly imperfect video has become the format audiences trust most — and the businesses succeeding with it are the ones treating it as a genuine skill to develop, not a one-off experiment to imitate.

Turns out being a bit silly, done properly, is now a perfectly serious strategy.

Are you the Cecil B Demille of your generation when it comes to making videos?

Let me know in the comments below of you are following this trend and/or are amused by others doing this?