The first second of a launch video

In February 2025 iAgent launched AGNT, an AI agent you train by playing games, along with a token, $AGNT, that pays you for it. iAgent and its partner had raised more than $13M and had over 700,000 users, and the launch came down to one short video in the feed. My studio made it. It ran for 22 seconds on iAgent’s X account on 25 February with no voiceover, and according to their CEO it passed 1.9 million views across their socials.

Looking back, I think it worked for reasons that apply to most launch videos.

People decide before you’ve said anything

Facebook’s research put the average time someone spends on a piece of content in the mobile feed at 1.7 seconds. That was 2016 and it was about Facebook, so take the exact number loosely. A year earlier the same team found that 47% of a video campaign’s value came from people who watched for less than three seconds. Most of your audience sees the opening and nothing else.

So the first moment of the iAgent video is the AGNT mark building inside its triangle frame, followed by a montage of shooter games cutting faster than once a second. Before a viewer knows anything about agents or tokens, they know this is about games.

Verbs instead of promises

The middle of the video is four full-screen cards with one verb each: play games, upload game footage, train your AGNT, earn $AGNT. Real game titles sit on screen behind the first one. The words carry everything, so the video plays the same with the sound off.

We wrote it that way because of who was watching. Gamers who had seen plenty of crypto launches had a fair question, which was whether this was a token with a game stapled on. Much later we read 520 comments about game trailers, play-to-earn games and AI-agent tokens, and 69 of the ones that mattered said play-to-earn games put the token first or aren’t fun. A plain list of what you actually do answers that better than a promise about the future.

The token comes last

“Earn $AGNT” doesn’t appear until 16.5 seconds in, over a spinning coin. Earning shows up as the result of playing, which is how the product works, and the token never becomes the headline.

What I’d change

The first verb doesn’t land until about 9.5 seconds. Everything before it says games without saying what you do, and given the numbers above, a lot of people had already scrolled on. If we made it again I’d put the first verb inside three seconds and let the montage run behind it.

I’d also end on proof. The video never shows that the product works or that 700,000 people were already using it, which was the strongest thing iAgent had. A real number in the last frame would have done more than the coin.

Two caveats. The 1.9M figure is the client’s, with no split by platform or date range. And the comment research came nineteen months after the video shipped, so it explains why the structure suits its audience. It didn’t shape it. The full case, with the research, is on alterra.studio.