Why More Brands are using Long Takes To Get Your Attention

Most ads fight for attention by cutting faster. A few now fight harder by refusing to cut at all.

The clutter of micro-edits

Open your phone and scrub through a dozen verticals: smash cuts, caption stutters, audio jumps. It used to be that the key to grabbing a doom scroller's attention was to keep regaining attention, because attention spans have gotten so poor. Editing itself has accelerated for decades; the average shot length in mainstream films fell from ~12 seconds in the 1930s to roughly 2–3 seconds in the 2000s. That change mirrors what we see in social feeds: constant re-orientation, constant novelty. It works—until everyone does it the same way. At that point, everyone trying to stand out is doing nothing but blending in.

So how do we fix it? Brands are now turning to The Long Shot; a single continuous shot to break up the monotony by being...monotonous, at least editing wise. A relic of the past, popularized by some old guys with names like Spielberg, Tarkovsky and Welles, we're now seeing it utilized by brands realizing that to capture interest is to interesting.

“Distinctive” beats “different” is now orthodoxy in brand strategy. The IPA and Ehrenberg-Bass crowd have hammered home that recognizable assets and clear, unusual executions drive memory. Distinctiveness isn’t precious; it’s practical recall engineering. A long take can be one of those assets—a formal decision that reads instantly as “ours,” especially when competitors are mid-cut every half second. 

Long takes are nothing new to advertising

Johnnie Walker — “The Man Who Walked Around the World.”

Robert Carlyle delivers a five-plus-minute brand history while strolling Highland roads—no visible cuts, just choreography. It’s product, provenance and performance fused by constraint. The ad has been extensively profiled as a single-take concept that relies on rehearsal over invisible VFX. It’s old enough to feel classical; it still plays fresh because most branded film won’t risk this level of commitment. 

But they feel new to the new way of advertising

GAP - Better in Denim

Wait. This GAP add has cuts. Why do you consider this a long take? Well, because look how long we go before we see a cut - a solid 13 seconds passes before we get our first cut, but already so much has happened on screen that is memorable. And that's the point; I've had to be hooked at least 10 seconds to get to the first cut. When is the last time you've seen a social media ad that didn't cut until 10 seconds in?

Gatorade - 100 Dingers for Julio

Imagine you want to tell a full story in 10 seconds. How would you do it? I think Gatorade accomplishes that here, using 10 seconds to show a simple action, a simple reaction, and then put an end card up that sells the vision. The caption fills in the rest of the context, but if your goal is to make sure those who know, know, and those who don't know to find out....well you can accomplish that through simplicity.

These ads aren’t new, and that’s the point. If “fast” is the default house style of 2025 social, then “continuous” reads new again—especially in-feed, where long takes contrast against template-driven edits. Social platforms are also quietly rewarding longer, more immersive pieces; YouTube creators have reported stronger performance for thorough videos over quick hits, and TikTok has nudged uploads beyond 60 seconds. That doesn’t prove causation, but it does describe an environment where a held shot can breathe. 

Cost trade-offs: rehearsal vs. post

This one is for the producers and the clients. When it comes to money, a long take moves spend from post into prep. The tool we trade is time—table reads if needed, tech rehearsals or choreography, resets measured in minutes rather than renders measured in hours. If you need a case study for the discipline, read the AC coverage of Birdman and 1917: both productions describe weeks of blocking, lens mapping, and handoffs to reduce the number (or visibility) of stitches. When it comes to the examples above, GAP had a full choreography; Gatorade had a couple of minutes with a professional athlete. You can get things done, but it takes planning and some meticulous detail. Ads aren’t features, but the economics rhyme: add a day of rehearsal or prep time, remove a week of micro-fixes. 

From a cinematography chair, the long take is a chain of unbroken dependencies:

• Blocking > lensing > moving light (and back again). Lighting has to travel or “hand off” convincingly; practicals do more work than units on stands.
• Focus as performance. Your 1st AC becomes a must have on set—marks, motors, look-ahead.
• Camera team stamina. Gimbals, Steadicam, cranes, dollies—pick one and block your movement; otherwise, lock it off and block your actors.

On paper, this looks expensive. In practice, the trade can be neutral or better when you count the post cascade: fewer setups, fewer dailies to log, fewer edge-case continuity notes, fewer edit revisions that exist only because there are too many angles to argue over.

When a long take is a gimmick—and when it works

A one-er fails when it has no intention. Each of the examples above was a crafted piece with intention, with the view that we must tell the story this way. A oner is a story; it must have a beginning, middle, and end; otherwise, you just have a really long shot. If there's no payoff from your setup, you've wasted time. If you have all payoff, but lack a compelling setup, you don't have a viewer. Your goal in crafting a oner (or more so, selling one), is to find a way to tell a story in only 10 seconds, or to tell a 30 second story without moving the camera. If you can do that, you have a compelling reason to do this as a oner.

The marketing case is simple: distinctive executions are more likely to be encoded and recalled—this is the von Restorff effect, a century-old memory finding that novelty inside a stream gets remembered disproportionately. You don’t need to cite the bias in the room; you just need the client to watch feeds for five minutes and agree that one continuous shot will pop in a stack of jump-cuts. 

Practical build: how we design a one-shot spot

1) Start with the story; not the camera.

Write the scene as a beat-map: what must change from 00:00 to 00:10? Where do we buy attention, where do we spend it? I annotate these like an editor—mini crescendos at :06 and :12, micro button at :22, brand lockup at :27.

2) Block it out & diagram it

Diagramming your action and how the camera intertwines with the action early is the key. The goal is to understand the problems you'll face ahead of time so you can prepare your solutions, because previsualizing how everything will work will help us understand what actually will work.

3) Try to kill it

Take a second, and genuinely ask yourself if this is the best way to tell this story. If you were to do it another way, with cuts, would the story be stronger? If so, kill the idea. You need to do what's best for the story. If you survive, let's move to production.

4) Commit to a field of view early.

Wide lenses forgive staging errors but expose lighting; long lenses compress time but punish focus and make it harder to land. Pick your focal length family and stick to it so the team can rehearse motor speeds and parallax.

5) Light to the movement.

Block the action early, and bring your gaffer to watch. Rehearse the action with the camera to let everyone know what we are seeing and where we are seeing it. Build zones; figure out your dead angles, and make diagrams early to make sure everyone knows the plan.

6) Choose your “save.”

Nobody says you must be purist. Pre-plan stitch points with motivated wipes (passing bodies, poles), exposure pops (into a practical), or motion blur (whip-pan) so you have a surgical VFX escape if the hero take is perfect minus one step.

If you can't get it, know what coverage you would need to get in order to cover yourself with cuts.

7) Rehearse like you’re cheap.

Tabletop the move with phones. Then with a body cap. Then with an unlit set. Shooting day is for execution, not discovery, especially if you're actors aren't available prior to set or have only limited time on set.

The client conversation: attention, not art house

Avoid the “film school” sales pitch. Sell outcomes:

• Recall through distinctiveness. The Nielsen/Meta drumbeat is the same year after year: creative quality is the top driver of ad effectiveness; distinct executions earn attention more efficiently. (Nielsen’s often-quoted “creative ~47% of sales contribution” is a directional reference point.) A one-er is a creative lever, not a fetish. 
• Fit to platform. YouTube performance has tilted toward deeper, more thorough narratives when the viewer intent is there; TikTok and Reels now comfortably host 60–90-second stories. That gives a long take room to breathe on surfaces that once demanded whiplash cuts. 
• Production risk that the plan absorbs. We’re not gambling on magic. We’re front-loading rehearsal, pre-viz, and technical scouting, the same way Birdman and 1917 did to retire post risk. 

Cost math: rehearsal vs post

Here’s a plain budget view I walk clients through:

• Option A (coverage): 12 setups, 3 takes each → 36 logged clips, 4–5 hours of dailies, edit with choice paralysis, 3–4 revision loops to pick the “right” rhythm.
• Option B (one-er): 4 setups (safety alt path included), 10 rehearsals, 6 serious takes → 6 clips to log, 1 principal assembly, sound design emphasis.
• Money movement: you spend on tech scout and blocking day; you save on editorial rounds and conform/online. You also reduce the chance of “we never got that cutaway,” because the story never needed it.

When we’re honest about total effort, the one-er is frequently the cheaper way to make the same idea—and nearly always the cheaper way to make a memorable version of it.

Distribution and format: vertical vs landscape

In vertical, the long take is a posture choice. You give up frantic edge-to-edge cuts and ask the viewer to lean in for progress: distance covered, scale revealed, constraint resolved. The lesson from creator analytics is not “make it long,” it’s “make the time feel used.” A hallway walk with evolving lighting cues, a countertop recipe with zero cuts and escalating stakes, a product assembly that never leaves frame—these map to the same attention logic that makes the Highland walk work at 16:9.

Technical guardrails (DP notes)

• Shutter & motion. Avoid micro-strobing on LED signage; if you pass through mixed refresh environments, pre-test shutter/ISO pairs.
• Rig choice by failure mode. Gimbal for portability, Steadicam for organic float, dolly/track for repeatability. Cranes are for reveals, not for “because crane.”
• Continuity anchors. In a cut spot, continuity is an edit problem. In a one-er, it’s an actor problem. Wardrobe resets, prop handling, and blocking must return to zero on every take.
• Never fall outside frame guides: If you are filming action, film within your frame guides. Anything that falls outside of it will end up looking unnatural in post as the editor pans and scans the footage.

What sells attention: tension and composition

If you choose the long take, you still need a reason for the viewer to keep watching. The mechanics are simple:

• Promise early. Show the constraint (“we’re doing this without cutting”) or the goal (“we’ll get from A to B before X happens”) in the first five seconds, or show the interest (there is a player waiting as the camera slowly zooms in).
• Stage reveals as progress. New information should arrive because the camera moved, not in spite of it: parallax reveals, door frames to mask scale jumps, light changes to signal chapter breaks.
• Hold back the brand until the story can carry it. A held shot buys permission for a later-arriving asset—sound sting, wordmark, product move.
• Let sound carry edits you no longer have. Swell ambiences where a cut would have gone; treat foley as punctuation.
• Finish with relief, not just completion. The classic walk-and-talk that finally sits, the product that finally pours, the choreo that finally lands—bodies relax, viewers do too.

In a world ruled by jump-cuts, sometimes the loudest move is to refuse to cut.