Organic Reels vs Paid Ads: Can Short-Form Video Work Like an Ad System?

The Short Answer

On the Unpacking Japan podcast, host Tobi asked Matt Hannan, Hanami Social’s founder and a former Senior Software Engineer on the Instagram Reels Creation team at Meta, about turning creators’ work into something that helps them earn without selling ad space. Matt explained how his automations work:

It starts with a comment on a short form video. So short form organic videos are meant to distribute infinitely based on someone’s interest in them, how interesting the video is. That’s a very powerful thing to use if you know what people are interested in.

This page collects what he said in the episode about organic video, advertising and metrics, in his words. Hear the full conversation on the Unpacking Japan episode page.

Paying for Attention, or Earning It

Matt compared the two directly:

So an advertising system, for example, you pay money to show people something that they may not want to see. With organic Reels content, you pay nothing and you only win if everyone likes or is interested in what the video is. So you can technically get attention for free. It’s just a skill gap.

“Social Media Never Had That Really”

He went on:

But advertising systems monetize really well. You can push someone towards a website and sell something with a purpose. Social media never had that really. A few years ago or however many years ago, Instagram basically made DM automation possible.

So from a comment on a Reel into an automated DM flow using AI, all these different options, that became the same as an advertising system that has some sales outcome. So I saw that and I thought, I bet I can build something that works exactly like an advertising system, which is really popular in Japan. They really understand advertising systems. They don’t really understand organic content.

More on the Japan side of this in Marketing in Japan vs the US.

Educational Content and the Call to Action

Tobi asked how Matt knew the approach was working. Matt said there are different types of short-form content, such as entertainment, and that in his particular domain it’s educational content:

The most interesting thing about educational content is you can have some sort of call to action or outcome at the end of the video where you give someone something valuable. … People will action on that in order to get it for free. And through that action, you can start this automation system and you can get marketing data, you can get email, you can start talking to people and build a community that you have forever, never leaves.

Advertising system, you stop paying, it stops.

The Book and the Cover

Talking about how videos of Japan get packaged for attention, Matt said:

I tend to look at social media as a book in a bookstore. There’s the content of how good that book is. And then there’s the cover and how attractive it is to people who just walk by. I think a lot of social media and the success that you have is about designing a beautiful cover or a shocking cover. … And I don’t think there’s anything bad about that, as long as the content of the book itself is honest and rigorous.

So if I package my video in the first three seconds to get people to watch it, I’m playing the game of distribution of an attention system. But there’s a purpose.

Views and Followers

He continued:

And I think social media being about views and followers is actually improper and incorrect. You can get a tremendous amount of views by making sensationalized entertainment content, but … you’ll receive viewers and followers, but not an audience. You will not be able to build a community. If it does not have value, you won’t be able to sell things. You won’t be able to educate people.

On how that shapes his business:

There’s further higher tier things that are more important, which is why I organize my business in this way. A traditional social media agency would tell a business that they’re going on a particular amount of views and followers. In my opinion, those are vanity metrics that don’t represent much. For a business, they care about selling their product and a return on investment. So that’s what we track from the beginning to the end. The vanity metrics are good proxies … but they’re not the whole thing.

He compared creators who grow with sensationalized content and creators who make things that are interesting, unique and that they believe in: “I don’t diss either one of them, but I’d probably rather talk to the second person.”

When the Algorithm Seems to Change

Tobi asked how Matt stays flexible in an industry where people’s attention changes constantly. Matt said:

Social media actually is one of the most difficult problems I can think of. Oddly enough. On the surface, it seems exceptionally straightforward. And for many people, their experience is that it’s straightforward and easy. For many people, it’s very difficult for a number of reasons. It’s a game of how well you can map human attention and what people are interested in. And many times what people chalk up to the algorithm changing is just people’s appetites for what they’re interested in and what they would like to see or learn about changing in real time. Very difficult for people to map that. So you have to be really tapped into people on the ground.

About Hanami Social

Hanami Social makes short-form videos and builds the automated follow-up behind them for American and other overseas brands. See how it works and the Instagram DM automation guide.