The Art of Personalisation
Crafting Unique Digital Experiences: Netflix’s Dynamic Sizzle
Let’s understand the importance of personalization and then dive into Netflix’s new personalized experience through Dynamic Sizzles.
We keep hearing about personalized experiences, tailor-made for you, etc. Was this something brought in by the advancements in technology? The answer is NO; we always had it in the business, but the technology just made it easy to bring it live to the online world.
A small personal story: I used to eat Maggi at a small stall in my college. After my initial visits, the shopkeeper asked if I would like my regular order or an extra cheesy spicy Maggi. He understood my preferences, remembered what I ordered, and suggested something I would like. That made me his loyal customer, who ordered Maggi only from there throughout my college days. These kinds of small gestures trigger emotions like “feeling special.” This is what we are calling the personalized experience in the digital world.
When you have physical interactions with your customers, it is easy to build these relations, but with growing e-commerce businesses, how can we create a sense of personalized experience? Is it worth investing in Personalization?
Personalized experience is proven to increase customer loyalty, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase ROI. A survey by McKinsey shows that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
For e-commerce businesses, technological advancements helped curate these personalized experiences, from addressing their customers by name in emails in the early days to creating AI-powered recommendation systems, creating a completely new virtual shopping experience by understanding customer preferences and behavior patterns. The experience keeps getting better and better. Let’s see how Netflix is leveraging technology to create a personalized experience using Dynamic Sizzles.
Whether you want to watch a film with your family or binge-watch an entire web series, Netflix is the go-to OTT platform for most of us. When you land on the home screen, the first thing you see on the screen is a movie trailer or a bunch of trailers stitched together. These are previously created manually and have selected custom-made trailers. Now, to make this experience better, Netflix is investing in a solution called Dynamic Sizzle, which will take bits and pieces from your preferred movies/shows and custom-make a trailer for you.
It is a massive cost-saving (70% in terms of time and cost) for Netflix as they are now automating the process and will bring all the advantages of personalization along. Here is a brief explanation of how Dynamic Sizzles are built.
Netflix compiles personalized multi-title/multi-talent promotional A/V assets into a Mega Asset (a large A/V asset comprising video clips from various titles). This acts as a library from which Dynamic Sizzle pulls media. Editors filter the mega asset by selecting clips that are both creative and technically feasible.
These are timecoded and broken into clips and frames of different sizes. The clips are then used to construct a personalized Dynamic Sizzle according to a predefined cadence based on title preferences and weighted according to the ranking. A number of these reels can be created by selecting multiple combinations of clips. Check out this article from Netflix on how they are building and playing these reels in detail.
The next time you land on Netflix and see a trailer made out of frames from your mom’s favorite show, your most awaited movie trailer, and your brother’s favorite cartoon, think of the impact it would have on your experience!
Stay tuned for more articles.
Sahithi Meda
