By Sean Beckingham

Before Reels. Before TikTok. Before every brand had a vertical video strategy.

There was Vine.

Six seconds.

That was it.

And for a little while, we were vining everything.

Vine launched in January 2013 and caught on incredibly fast. By June it had 13 million users. By August, Twitter said that number had hit 40 million. A year later, more than 100 million people were watching Vines every month and the platform was generating more than a billion loops a day.

For something that basically disappeared, it was huge.

At Branding & Buzzing, we jumped in pretty early.

We were working with Great Lakes Brewery at the time, and Peter Bulut was perfect for it.

Peter was awesome on camera. Funny, natural and completely comfortable just being Peter. He would call me when something interesting was happening at the brewery and we’d make a Vine.

I remember one about a new beer and some hops Peter had bought.

That was basically the production.

Peter, me, some hops and six seconds.

No big production.

No lighting crew.

No content day.

No 14-page shot list.

A phone and six seconds.

And those six seconds could be surprisingly difficult.

Six seconds was actually six seconds

Early Vine was pretty primitive.

You had about six seconds to tell the entire story. There was basically no proper editing. Initially there weren’t even drafts. You couldn’t simply shoot something with your phone and upload it later. You had to shoot inside Vine.

And if something went wrong?

Start again.

There were reports at the time of Vines disappearing if the app crashed or if you left before posting. Vine didn’t add proper editing and multiple drafts until later in 2013, and you couldn’t import video from your camera roll until August 2014.

It could be incredibly annoying.

But looking back, I think those limitations were also what made it good.

You couldn’t overthink it.

You had six seconds.

Figure it out.

We were vining everything

Social media was changing ridiculously fast.

We were trying everything.

If there was a new app, we downloaded it.

If it had video, we tried shooting something.

If Peter had an idea, there was a pretty good chance I’d get a call.

Some of it worked.

Some of it didn’t.

But Great Lakes was a perfect client for that period because they were willing to experiment. They were scrappy. The beer names were fun. The packaging was fun. Peter was fun.

Vine fit the brand.

And that’s an important distinction.

Because around the same time I remember having a very different conversation with a blue-chip client.

They wanted to get on Vine because Vine was the new thing.

My response was basically:

“Just because there’s a new shiny tool doesn’t mean we have to jump to use it.”

I still believe that.

Great Lakes being on Vine made sense.

Putting a brand on Vine simply so somebody in a meeting could say we’re on Vine didn’t.

There’s a difference.

Then Instagram showed up

I remember listening to CBC Radio around that period and hearing discussions about Instagram and the battle over social video.

Instagram was still primarily the place you posted photos.

Then, in June 2013, Instagram introduced video.

And it wasn’t six seconds.

You got 15 seconds.

You got editing.

You got filters.

Most importantly, you got all of that inside an app where millions of people already had an audience.

Suddenly Vine wasn’t the only interesting little video tool.

Then there was Snapchat.

YouTube kept growing.

Facebook pushed further into video.

The shiny new thing wasn’t shiny for very long.

Remember Periscope?

There was another one.

Periscope.

For a while live streaming from your phone felt like it was going to change everything.

Twitter bought Periscope before its public launch in 2015. Around the same time another live-streaming app called Meerkat exploded onto the scene.

For a few months everyone in social media was talking about Meerkat and Periscope.

Then Twitter restricted Meerkat’s access to its social graph while building Periscope into its own ecosystem.

Eventually Periscope disappeared too. Twitter shut down the standalone app in 2021 after saying usage had declined and maintaining it had become unsustainable.

Wild times.

Sometimes the app was dead before the meeting was over

This is the part that’s hard to explain now.

Companies moved much more slowly than social media did.

Sometimes we’d discover an app, start experimenting with it, figure out what worked and begin creating content.

Meanwhile, a larger company’s marketing department might still be trying to figure out what the app was.

Someone had to bring it up in a meeting.

Then someone needed to research it.

Then there was another meeting.

Then somebody needed approval.

By the time everyone agreed they should probably “develop a Vine strategy,” the audience was already talking about the next app.

Sometimes the new app and the dead app were practically the same app.

So what killed Vine?

There wasn’t one single thing.

Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube were becoming stronger competitors. Vine’s biggest creators increasingly had better opportunities elsewhere. Vine also struggled to build a strong monetization model for those creators.

By 2015, some of Vine’s biggest stars could see what was happening. Eighteen prominent creators reportedly met with Vine and proposed a deal under which each would receive $1.2 million to keep producing original content for the platform, along with product improvements. The agreement never happened.

By 2016, the numbers were moving the wrong way. Downloads had fallen sharply, creators were leaving, and parent company Twitter itself was under financial pressure. Twitter announced Vine’s shutdown in October 2016. The social network effectively ended in January 2017.

A platform that had once claimed more than 200 million active users was gone.

Just like that.

Until the next shiny thing

Eventually Facebook, Instagram and the rest of the Meta ecosystem became, for better or worse, the places most brands knew they had to be.

For a while things actually felt a little more settled.

Then TikTok arrived.

And suddenly we were having those conversations all over again.

New format.

New creators.

New rules.

Brands wondering if they needed to be there.

Marketing teams trying to figure out what to do with it.

The funny thing is that TikTok, Reels and Shorts owe quite a bit to that weird little six-second app we were playing around with years earlier. Vine helped prove that people would happily watch extremely short, vertical, personality-driven video over and over again.

We didn’t call it short-form vertical video.

We didn’t have a content pillar for it.

Peter would call me.

We’d pull out the phone.

And we had six seconds to figure it out.