Most parents who have traveled overnight with young children know that one way to make sleeping in an unfamiliar place less unsettling for their kids is to pack their favorite stuffed animals. Those companions can make any bed feel cozier. The result: a better night sleep for the kids, not to mention mom and dad.

What if there was something like this that could help reluctant marketers make the transition to mobile? If you’re experienced making TV spots or online video, you’re in luck. Sticking with the analogy, video may just be the marketer’s plush toy, the sort of gateway tactic that could make it easy for any seasoned but reluctant pro to make the leap into mobile marketing.

To experienced marketers, video is tried and true. They’ve seen it work in all sorts of ways, whether on television or at company meetings. There is a mature market of talent capable of producing terrific videos. They include mega agencies and one-woman shops all over the country. No one disputes the medium’s power to engage. All this makes video very comfortable.

How we consume video is changing rapidly, though. TV viewership remains in slow and steady decline. According to eMarketer, on the other hand, digital video consumption rose 32 percent quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2015.  As with any uptick in digital media consumption these days, you can bet that mobile devices account for the lion’s share of that increase.

This migration of video viewing to mobile devices means that industry veterans who feel quite comfortable with video now have their on-ramp to mobile marketing. There are just a few things to keep in mind as you imagine producing and distributing videos for smartphones and tablets.

1. Creating videos for smaller screens, while not difficult, requires some changes in the production process.

2. While YouTube has been hosting videos for 10 years, Facebook is at least as important these days. Facebook already attracts more desktop video views than YouTube, and with Facebook accounting for about 20 percent of the time we spend with apps on our phones, anyone preparing a 30 or 15 second ad should pursue in-feed advertising placement on Facebook.

3. Building engaging videos for Facebook isn’t hard, but check out the article here for a few tips on doing it well.

4. Video on Facebook doesn’t have to support merely branding. It also can support bottom-of-funnel marketing objectives, including direct response.

There’s another way to see a surge in mobile video as an opportunity for the more experienced marketer.

To marketers with less than five years of experience, video may not be familiar. Today’s hottest marketing jobs, such as search engine marketing and social media, don’t require video to be successful. The result is that many of marketing’s more modern practitioners don’t have as much experience using video as marketers did 15 years ago.

It’s exciting to think that anyone who has produced a TV spot, what we now think of as traditional advertising, has what it takes to apply that talent to mobile marketing, and in the process teach the younger generation a thing or two.