WHAT IS PERSONALIZED VIDEO?
The landscape of communication has changed forever thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Face-to-face meetings may be preferred but they generally happen less frequently, as consumers have discovered the convenience of video conferencing platforms like Zoom and they use them in their daily lives— whether for personal communication or business.
While the quarantine era certainly forced change, the trend towards less in-person communication has been developing for years— decades, really. The shift in consumer shopping habits is the clearest sign that this was coming, even if it was not as blatantly obvious as it is today, post-pandemic. In many cases, online purchases have replaced the need to visit a retail store entirely. There is a reason Amazon has over 12 Million products native to their platform and logs over 350 million products for sale when including marketplace partners. The convenience of technology is an undeniable part of our daily lives.
Because of its convenience, consumers continue to be more demanding, possibly unreasonably so. They want brands to understand them deeply but are less likely to help educate them on their needs in person - but they will do it through data. In many ways the strength of today’s consumer to brand relationship has shifted from in-person conversations to the amount of data consumers are willing to share digitally.
In fact, it might be said that this is the same approach consumers have always had. People are willing to help a brand educate itself on their needs and wants so the brand can respond with relevant products and messaging to support the relationship. The better the brand listens, the better they can engage with clients. That part hasn’t changed
What has changed is how conversations between brands and consumers happen. Today those interactions happen digitally through the exchange of available data.
Brands that choose to be laggards in data strategy, will not be able to recognize or respond to the trust given to them by their customers. There will be no clear conversation. And without communication, either in-person or digitally, they should expect a natural erosion of brand equity and loyalty. Refusing to leverage your customers' shared data is tantamount to opening a store in a foreign country without being able to greet them in their native language. To not receive and respond to data is to be illiterate.
So what can reasonably be done to meet the challenge of less footfall in-store and data forward consumers that have a propensity towards avoiding in-person conversations? One part of that equation must be the use of personalized video.
What is a personalized Video?
Personalized video is the use of data to automate the creation of content individualized to the recipient. Whether it’s 100 or 100 Million videos, each recipient gets a curated, data-driven video, built just for them. At its most basic level, it is the replacement of traditional personalized emails sent out of Marketing Automation Platforms like Salesforce, Mailchimp etc.
Until now, creating so many videos would have been impossible. Video has historically been expensive to create, time intensive and difficult to produce without access to high skill sets for editing. The advent of online technologies such as Canva and Promo have made things easier but production at scale remains unattainable for all but very large brands.
Adificial intends to change this. Our tool will skip the complexity of tools like Adobe After Effects to allow a non-technical person with little to no design skills to map data and brand elements so that once those two things align, videos are created and sent automatically.
Why Personalized Video?
Let’s face it, from your local coffee shop barista knowing your typical coffee drink by heart to Netflix curating content based on your known data and Amazon recommending products, personalization works and it works because consumers find it useful and enjoyable.
Personalized video takes engagement to a new level. The comprehension of video far exceeds that of written correspondence. Videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text. And that makes sense because the cognitive system of the brain doesn’t have to work nearly as hard. Watching video is passive compared to carefully reading, digesting and remembering text. Because video is less demanding it is more desirable overall to consume.
In 2020 video uploads and consumption rocketed to new heights. According to Forbes, 78% of people now watch videos online each week, and 55% say they watch them daily. YouTube reports that 72 hours of video is uploaded to their platform every 60 seconds. Those statistics are compelling.
Beyond comprehension, video offers brands analytical insight that does not exist with text based marketing correspondence. Through the use of advanced video players that can be embedded into websites or contextual to the viewer on a specific landing page, deep knowledge on engagement can be harvested, down the individual frame. Open rate of email is no longer where the measurement ends before conversion. With per frame measurement, brands can now know exactly when people start watching or skip ahead in a video to a point in time they believe is best suited to watch for their needs.
Once you collect all of this data, the right software partner will help you crunch the numbers so you can make smart decisions on how to improve your content to maximize your investment. A/B testing is old news. When you scale messaging to thousands or millions of possible iterations, you can test far deeper— and should. With modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, algorithms identify what is working and what is less than optimized and helps you make the right changes.
If you would like to learn more about the Adificial, personalized video platform, sign up here for our beta user program and we’ll contact you when it’s time to jump in.