Video Marketing Trends Shaping 2019
A snapshot of where video marketing stood in 2019, from Instagram Stories' dominance to the shift toward sound-off, caption-led viewing.
Video didn’t sneak up on marketers in 2019, it announced itself. Instagram had crossed 500 million daily Stories users at the start of the year, Facebook’s autoplay feed had trained an entire generation to watch without sound and YouTube remained the second-largest search engine on the planet. What changed in 2019 wasn’t whether businesses should use video, most already had, it was which formats earned attention and which ones quietly wasted budget.
Stories ate the feed
By 2019, the Stories format (vertical, full-screen, disappearing after 24 hours) had spread from Snapchat to Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and even LinkedIn tested it. For businesses, this meant rethinking video production entirely. A polished 16:9 commercial felt out of place in a format built for phone-shot, in-the-moment content. Brands that leaned into the rawer, native feel of Stories consistently outperformed those that just resized their existing ads.
IGTV struggled to find its audience
Instagram launched IGTV in mid-2018 as a long-form, vertical video app meant to compete with YouTube. Through 2019 it kept adding features, a redesigned feed, a home-screen shortcut, but adoption stayed thin. The lesson for marketers was blunt: a new format from a major platform isn’t automatically worth chasing. IGTV taught a lot of teams to wait for real audience behavior instead of jumping on every new tab a platform rolled out.
Sound-off viewing became the default assumption
Facebook had reported for years that a large majority of video views happened with the sound off, and by 2019 that number had become table stakes for anyone planning a video budget. Burned-in captions, text overlays and visuals that told the story without audio stopped being a nice-to-have and became the baseline for any video meant to run in a social feed.
Live video kept growing, quietly
Instagram Live, Facebook Live and Twitch (still mostly gaming, but increasingly used by brands for product reveals and Q&As) all saw real engagement gains in 2019. Live video’s appeal wasn’t production value, it was access: an unscripted, real-time conversation that felt harder to fake than a polished ad. Small businesses without big budgets found live video was one of the few formats where a modest setup could compete with a much bigger one.
A new competitor was quietly gaining ground
TikTok, formed from the 2018 merger of Musical.ly and Douyin’s international app, spent 2019 building real momentum outside China, including a fast-growing US teen audience by the back half of the year. Most marketers were still watching from the sidelines, unsure whether it was a fad or the start of something bigger. In hindsight, 2019 was the quiet run-up to a shift that would reshape short-form video within two years.
What this meant for a real business
None of these trends required a big production budget. The businesses that got the most out of video in 2019 picked one or two formats that matched where their audience spent time, shot for sound-off viewing by default and treated live video as a low-cost way to build trust rather than a stage for a scripted pitch. The platforms would keep shifting, they always do, but the businesses paying attention to actual viewing behavior rather than industry hype came out of 2019 with a real head start.
More on this topic: browse Content Marketing guides, the rest of what we published in 2019 or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
