good strategists need to know what Clipping is
how to use it, what we can learn, + early Halloween costume winners
I’m writing to you on a Sunday from the bar at The Smith.
The Flatiron location is a bit overstimulating, but I’ve spent the day shooting in Central Park and at the (very crowded) Frick Museum—I’m up to the task.
If you’re also in NYC, early voting for the mayoral race is now open. Find your polling place here.
No matter where you are in the world, you’ve most likely heard about Clipping—a powerful tool born out of the rise of interest graphs, increased power of UGC, and the general shrinking of our time tolerance.
Truthfully, I wasn’t immersed in the world of Clipping before this, but I’m downright fascinated. Which is why:
I dove deep, to share all about Clipping + how to use it
Why I’m capitalizing Clipping
Let’s talk about what it is, the two ways in, and what we can ultimately learn from the (very skilled) butchers of long-form.
what is Clipping?
Clipping is the art (and rapidly growing cottage industry) of taking longer-form content and turning it into short, slick, scroll-stopping clips for platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
They’re being paid by brands, creators and start-ups specifically to flood social feeds with these bite-sized moments, at scale.
What stands out to me: it’s not exclusively about being a skilled editor. It’s about engineering “virality” via a high volume of content.
One clipper quoted by the WSJ said:
“The only way to be famous in today’s internet world is with clips.”
Here are the mechanics:
Anything can be clipped—a 60-minute podcast, a demo, a Zoom call.
Clippers are often paid on a performance basis (e.g., dollars per thousand views).
They don’t have giant starting followings; the algorithms reward engagement, shareability and hook strength. Flood the feed, and eventually something will hit.
Clippers are often faceless accounts that post anywhere from 5-50 clips from a single piece of media.
As with all of social, there’s a science to it—it relies on knowing where someone might stop scrolling, where emotion peaks, or where interest may drop off.
And worth mentioning, the “Clipping”-based content that’s tagged on social right now looks very MLM—sign up for my course, you’ll be rich, etc. But as this category of creators grows, so does its legitimacy.
Mr. Beast has entered the chat with Vyro, and there are a lot of emerging tools promising to make it easy to Clip. Brands are using it too. Let’s talk about it.
how to use Clippers for your brand
Ranging from B2B like Ramp to media empires like Netflix—Clipping, and Clippers, can be effective in a variety of different use cases.
Generally speaking, you can think about Clipping in two ways:
As content creators
To inform creative approach
Specifically, here are the instances you could apply Clipping to your brand:
01_Repurposing a “Hero Film”
Turn your long-form into bite-sized social moments. Gushers did this with their Halloween film—7 minutes turned into 5 snackable clips with consumer POV supers.
02_Making Events Interesting
Clippers can turn candid moments, interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage into dozens of standalone posts, making more people care about your IRL moment.
03_Amplifying Major Brand Tentpoles
Ramp’s NYC activation used clipping to amplify its key story beats and expand reach.
Clipping is a really great way to make a moment feel even bigger than it was and land on new users’ feeds, all while guaranteeing you UGC.
04_Remixing Always-On Content
Handing over tons of evergreen footage to a Clipper is so exciting to me—I want to test it with a recent campaign we shot.
Similar to films and TV Shows that are being Clipped, it can give existing content new life, and allow it another chance to hit. I would go with a Creator here to reach new audiences, or give your footage a lot of time to breathe.
05_Storytelling Insights
Was one moment, segment, or character better received than others? Clipping is a really interesting way to A/B test every creative aspect of your brand.
what we can learn from Clippers
A few key lessons:
01_Think like writers
They don’t just cut up content, they reshape the story arcs for limited attention spans. They find the emotional or tension peak early, reframe the context, and make the audience care, with both what’s happening on-screen and the text placed on it.
It’s how we should aim to approach a lot of our social content, IMO.
02_Platform fluency > Aesthetics
If Netflix can post like a Clipper, with basic text on screen, then I think you can too. Focus on what performs, not where the brand can insert itself.
03_Lead with the payoff
Not starting with what someone is watching, but instead why it matters.
This is how Mr. Beast opens every video—frontloading a TON of context. It’s why people finish his videos.
The text on screen at the start of the video is also a great place to do this, summarizing the story for the audience.
04_Design for different sound settings
Whether the person watching is sound off or on by default can’t matter. Your end product needs to serve both.
Have the pacing of captions be quick (one word at a time seems to be hitting lately), overlay a background track where it makes sense, and layer in additive sound effects.
05_Trim the outro
Cutting out as soon as the action is over, with no endcards, pointing to the next episode if there is one.
The more you can land on intrigue, the better.
06_Become a scientist
Testing everything we do from different stories, moments, characters, hooks, audio, tonality, to the text on screen and in the caption.
Tinkering and refining are constant—it’s literally their business to do so. Isn’t it ours too?
07_Feed the algorithm
When you engage with one piece of content, and there’s a part after that, the algorithm is quite good at feeding you the next episode, or even related content. What potentially comes after this?
A few more things that caught my eye this week:
quickplays
Lisa Frank is essentially a meme page on IG and it’s really great.
Early Halloween costume winners: Louvre robbers, the Lorax, Mr. Tumnus, Lizzo as the 24K Gold Labubu (10.3M views in one day), and Zynderella. WHIMSY!
The Dunkin Spidey Donut storyline continues on, and I love how much they’ve doubled down. It’s working, with little audience fatigue and 46k new IG followers in 30 days.
Gigi, the mom of creator Jordan Welch, is my new fixation. She has baddie energy and is the definition of this diva.
Lily Allen, the musician, is now on Substack to announce her newest album.
TYSM for being here!!!!!!
Expect a Halloween special edition of Rec + the Culture Corner, and some big life updates sooooon that you’ll be the first to hear about. 👀
DRL 🫧
Clipping gives a similar effect to building out a content series EXCEPT its a much lighter lift. Completely agree that this is the best way to keep your volume high and users interested without running your content team into the ground.
This is really a great breakdown. But it makes me wonder where this arms race takes us. Social fatigue is everywhere. Clipping is effective, but effectiveness isn’t the same as nourishment.