The Return of the Long-Form Thinker

Parekhit Bhattacharjee:

There’s a meeting happening right now, somewhere, where someone is asking how to shrink an entire campaign into a seven-second video. Maybe a three-word hook. Format it for the scroll, the double-tap, the reflex. We’ve all sat in that meeting.

And honestly, that’s fair enough. Short content earns its place: it’s how most people discover something in the first place, and there’s real craft in saying something true in seven seconds. But here’s the part nobody in that meeting tends to say out loud. While everyone optimizes for the scroll, a fairly large room sits empty next door.

The room marked depth. Data firms like HubSpot have been tracking something a bit counterintuitive. Short-form video keeps growing, more noise, more reach, more reflex, and that’s not going anywhere. But engagement with genuinely long-form, substantive content hasn’t collapsed the way a lot of people assumed it would. If anything, it’s held fairly steady. Less because people got tired of short content, and more because they got tired of seeing the same idea repackaged forty different ways before lunch.

Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves nobody reads anymore. That’s not quite true. People read constantly. What they’ve stopped doing is finishing the templated corporate update that reads like it took four seconds and zero thought to produce.

The two formats just do different jobs. Short-form is excellent at grabbing a reflex: a scroll, a glance, a half-second of attention before the next thing. Long-form does something slower. It holds a mind in place for longer than five seconds, which is a harder thing to pull off, and that difficulty is exactly where its value comes from.

Look at who actually has authority right now. It’s not always the loudest account posting six times a day, though sometimes it is. Often it’s the person, or the brand, that read the twenty-page report nobody else got through, noticed the quiet shift everyone missed, and wrote something with actual weight behind it.

There’s a real edge in being willing to go long when the subject genuinely calls for it. If your whole narrative fits on a single Instagram caption with three bullet points, fine, that’s a caption, and a good caption is a real skill. It’s just not the same thing as a campaign with something to say.

Both formats are useful. Most good communication probably needs a bit of each. But the people who still know how to think, and write, in full paragraphs are building something that tends to last a little longer than a swipe. Challenge accepted?

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Parekhit Bhattacharjee leads global communications for Logitech’s Core Product Category, shaping narratives that connect business priorities with culture and audiences across the world.