Wednesday, twelve minutes into a client call, somebody asked whether we needed an IGTV channel. Instagram had launched it the previous afternoon. The person asking had not opened it.
Neither had anyone else on the call, so we opened it together, which took about ninety seconds and produced the specific silence of six people waiting for someone else to be impressed first.
IGTV is long-form vertical video. Up to an hour for larger accounts, a standalone app, a button in the corner of the feed, autoplay the moment you arrive. It is positioned, without much subtlety, as television.
By Friday four more people had asked me the same question, and not one of them could tell me what they wanted to put there.
That is the tell.
A channel is not a strategy, and a format nobody asked for is not an opportunity, it is a budget line waiting for a reason.
Three things worth holding onto before your team builds a content calendar for this.
One. Stories worked because the behavior existed first. Snapchat spent three years proving that people would watch vertical, disposable, badly lit video from people they already knew, and Instagram then copied a container that somebody else's users had already validated. IGTV has no Snapchat behind it. Nobody has proven that people want to watch an hour of vertical anything.
Two. Length was not the constraint holding your video back. If your two-minute brand film is not getting finished, the problem is the film. A product that removes a limit you were never straining against is a product built for somebody else's problem, and in this case the somebody else is Instagram, which needs to keep the creators who have started eyeing YouTube payouts.
Three. Watch the creators, not the brands. If this becomes real, it will be because a handful of people with two million followers each work out a native rhythm for it, the way vloggers invented YouTube while every network executive was busy explaining why it would not last. That takes months, and it will not look like anything currently in your deck.
Nobody has proven that people want to watch an hour of vertical anything.
So my actual advice, the one that gets me disinvited from launch-week calls: post nothing for ninety days. Watch what the creators do with it. Keep making the feed work, because the feed is still where your audience actually is. Then decide, with evidence.
Truffles sat on my desk through that entire client call and never once looked at the screen. Barnaby leaves the room whenever anything autoplays. Between the two of them they have a more disciplined content strategy than most of the ones I read this week.