Decoding homepage video backgrounds: What FAVBs reveal about university brand storytelling

Full-width, auto-playing video backgrounds (FAVBs) have become prominent above-the-fold features on higher education institution homepages, replacing traditional banners and slideshows. Yet academic literature has largely overlooked them.

This session presents a foundational content analysis of homepage FAVBs. It examines what the videos communicate about university brand image and how their sequencing and pacing shape interpretation.

Through a talk, a brief methodology demo and audience discussion, we’ll cover:

• How we identified FAVBs across a large set of higher education homepages.
• How we programmatically divided videos into scenes and open-coded them using a university brand image framework.
• What the findings mean for web and marketing teams that commission, edit and use homepage video.

The study analyzed 775 homepage FAVBs from a curated set of 3,407 higher education homepages. It divided the videos into 12,067 scenes and coded them across themes including campus aesthetics, student life, teaching and training, research, athletics, value and success, brand marks and location.

We’ll share findings you can apply to your brand and web strategy right away. FAVBs often follow an implicit three-act narrative: orientation, experience and achievement. They also move at montage-like speed, with scenes averaging about 2.24 seconds. That pace raises important questions about what viewers can absorb when video functions as a background.

We’ll close with a practical “design grammar” for creating or revising homepage FAVBs as modular story units: place hooks, experience vignettes and achievement clips. Recombine these units across your homepage, program pages and social stories to reinforce your university brand consistently.

Presenters

• Joel Goodman — Squiz
• Eric Sembrat — Georgia Institute of Technology
• Tryon Eggleston — Monmouth University