Where is the world of digital video content headed?
Our attention spans are getting shorter and competition for eyeballs is only getting tougher. To combat this, marketers have embraced video to engage with their audiences and the results have followed. In fact, 60 percent of visitors to a webpage will watch a video before reading text. As video consumption increases and the medium continues to prove its ROI, it’s worth shaking up our shared notion of what is best practice in video production.
The old school notion that your video has to appeal to a mass audience because of the cost of production and media no longer holds. In fact, appealing to a niche audience — your target — is going to drive greater results. And with developing technologies in AI and content production, we will soon have the ability to create more complex stories that communicate specifically to individuals. It’s no surprise that innovation in the video creation business is exploding.
One exciting frontier of personalized experiences is in AR/VR. Companies like Tobii have developed VR headsets that allow us to track the viewer’s eyeball movements, which provides data around what the viewer looked at and for how long. AI then determines what the viewer is interested in and can insert those brands or products into what otherwise feels like a choose-your-own-adventure experience that the viewer is controlling — much like the digital retargeting that occurs when you visit a site like Amazon and then the products you viewed show up in your Facebook feed.
Another exciting development is the emergence of personalized video platforms. Recently here at Blackbelt.ai, we had the opportunity to work with AT&T and Infosys to develop a platform that sends personalized video messages to individual customers that are created in the instant that the viewer begins to watch them. The platform hosts an audio library of names, dates, time and product descriptions. Then based on the needed communication, like a cell phone upgrade or cable installation, the video addresses the customer by name — like, Good morning, Tom both in a natural sounding voice over and on-screen text — giving them the information they need for their specific purchase. The result of this has led to a 20 percent reduction in call volume to customer service when dynamic video is used.
The power of AI will also unlock video’s potential in email campaigns. Take Playable, a video email marketing platform that has figured out how to stream 4k video directly in email and plans to launch an AI smart video editor that will test thousands of video variants then based on performance, deliver the winning version to all remaining unopened emails. This instant optimization will change the game for both marketers and consumers — consumers will receive relevant content and, as a result, marketers will see increased engagement.
In the next two to three years AI will add so much more to personalized video that individual consumer communications could be so diverse that the product or service is the only common thread throughout the campaign.
These tools and innovations will ultimately allow us to focus on the one thing that matters, content the customer wants.
