Using SnapStream to Influence Culture (Video)
SnapStream User Conference (NY 2018)
Watch SnapStream customers Condé Nast, Dubsmash, CBS This Morning and Major League Soccer discuss how TV plays a critical role for modern media organizations.
Joe Atkinson from Major League Soccer describes how they use SnapStream to send clips from live games to physicians on the sidelines to help determine possible medical issues. Suchit Dash from Dubsmash explains how they quickly create TV clips for their Dubsmash app so users can lip sync to popular shows. Panelists Nicole Dellert from Condé Nast and Brandon Launerts from CBS This Morning both describe how posting TV to social, using SnapStream, helps their social media departments stay ahead of the competition.
Also watch our How to Scale SnapStream video
Panelists
Nicole Dellert | Head of Social News Desk
Nicole heads up a desk of writers, designers, and editors who are tasked with creating engaging content for the internet. This includes but is not limited to article content, short social videos, gifs/memes and captioned videos. “We use SnapStream to support W Mag, Vogue, Allure, Vanity Fair, Brides, GQ, Teen Vogue and Glamour.”
Suchit Dash | President
Suchit Dash is responsible for developing strategic partnerships with publishers, solution providers and other key players in the digital goods and social media industries.
Brandon Launerts | Social Media Associate Producer
Brandon is the Social Media Associate Producer at CBS This Morning, America’s fastest-growing network morning news broadcast. In October 2016, Brandon was offered an opportunity to move to New York City to work at CBS News, a dream of his. Brandon is a fan of new media and the future of digital media in journalism and broadcast news.
Joe Atkinson | Senior Manager Medical Administration
Joe Atkinson started with Major League Soccer in September of 2016. Joe leads a team that coordinates all things medical for both MLS and Sum. He serves as the main point of contact for medical contracts, policy and research. Joe oversees the League’s Workers Compensation program, Head Injury Spotter program and manages the Medical Operations Manual.
SnapStream User Panel Transcript
0:00:03:>>ERIC COHN: Yeah, sure. Hi, everybody. We’re going to get underway here. If you want to get some coffee, get some water, grab a little bite to eat, please feel free to continue doing so. My name is Eric Cohn. I’m the West Coast sales manager for SnapStream. And I’m so excited today that I get to lead the session called We Have the Biggest Buttons using SnapStream to influence culture, if you’ll allow me to steal a Trump quote. This is — I didn’t say — I didn’t — anyways. So more than anything this is our user our user panel. These are people that are in SnapStream almost every day. They’ve figured out some really, really amazing and interesting ways to use the software. And I’m really excited to introduce everybody and show you what they do. We have some interesting questions that I’m sure we’ll have some fun conversation. We’ll have some opportunities for you to ask questions. I want to introduce our panelists here really quickly. We have Nicole Dellert from Conde Nast. Suchit Dash from Dubsmash. Brandon Launerts from CBS News. And Joe Atkinson from Major League Soccer. I’m going to go through really quickly. We have a slide made up for each one. We’re going to talk a little bit. If you don’t mind introducing yourself, talk a little bit about how you use SnapStream and if you wouldn’t mind. And then we’ll go from there. So without further ado, I’ll introduce Joe Atkinson.
0:01:41:>>JOE ATKINSON: Good afternoon. So I guess I’m going to be the oddball. As you can see by slide, how we use SnapStream. So we don’t use it in a typical media platform. We use it from a medical platform we had a problem. The commissioner came to me and said, hey, we’ve got a problem. We’re seeing things on TV that the guys on the sidelines aren’t seeing from the physicians’ standpoint. Because obviously the physicians aren’t full of and you can’t see all way across the Bill with the opposite side. So we need to be able to get them to be able to see what their looking and see what we see on TV. So that we don’t get ripped apart by Twitter or by Instagram or something like that because they saw something on TV that our docs weren’t able to because they just weren’t there. So we kicked around a few ideas and it didn’t go real far real fast. And then I hit up our guys and presented them — because obviously I.T. guys are smarter than the rest of us, said hey, here’s my problem. Fix it. And we started talking with SnapStream about it. So what we basically do is we have a soccer operation center here and is based in New York. And we get all the broadcast feeds from all the sports to try and just kind of observe and make sure. It started off to make sure that fans were doing the right thing, that the signage was in the right place, the billboards are right that and they were meeting their start ties for broadcast media and things like that. But we had to all that in there so we loaded SnapStream up and we sit in our operations center on — during game day and watch. And if we see we have certified athletic trainers who come in and actually watch these games to make sure that if anything happens specifically due to head injuries or possible concussions, they see that video. Then they take SnapStream. They cut that video. And then we email it to an iPad that the physician on the sidelines ha. And he can pick that up, review that video before he goes out and interacts with the players that he has not only what the players telling him but what the actual visual representation of the injury was to include if broadcast pushes it the slow motion replay. And it’s been very beneficial to him.
0:03:32:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Unintelligible).
0:03:35:>>JOE ATKINSON: So we’re averaging three and a half minutes. From the time I hit send, to the time they have it on the sidelines, it’s three and a half minutes. And it’s just sent via email through our — because once we cut it, technically becomes medical information. So it’s got to be encrypted because it’s being used for medical diagnostics. And so it has to go through an encrypted side. So we have a special setup within MLS that we push it out through to a dedicated email that’s on each iPad.
0:03:59:>>ERIC COHN: Suchit.
0:04:04:>>SUCHIT DASH: Hi, my name is Suchit Dash. I’m president of a company called Dubsmash. We’re actually the youngest company here on this panel. Been around for about two and a half years. It’s an iPhone app on your phones or Android devices. And what you can do is you can actually take any sort of audio clip and you can record yourself over the sound. So think Arnold Schwarzenegger I’ll be back. Your face. Arnold’s voice and you’re mouthing it and do a lip sync video.
0:04:30:>>ERIC COHN: I’ll play this real quick, if you don’t mind.
0:04:32:>>SUCHIT DASH: Yeah. So you can see just this video. This will give you an example of the what its like.
0:04:36:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: What’s your favorite app?
0:04:39:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Dubsmash, obviously.
0:04:41:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Well, I just happened to have Dubsmash on my phone.
0:04:44:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: You do.
0:04:44:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Singing) Amazing grace.
0:04:53:>>UNIDENTIFIED VOICES: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
0:04:53:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I know that you’re a huge fan of this app.
0:04:55:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Yes, I am.
0:04:55:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: But for those who don’t know about Dubsmash, they have thousands of different sound bites from movies, TV shows.
0:05:10:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I would like to buy a hamburger.
0:05:13:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Singing) Perhaps, you’ve saw me in “Westworld.” I acted like a robotic cowboy.
0:05:31:>>UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Do you want to build a snowman?
0:05:35:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: No. God.
0:05:35:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?
0:05:35:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
0:05:35:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: Wake your ass up because it’s time to go beast mode.
0:05:42:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: If you’re not real, then how come I feel this way.
0:05:46:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I am a trained actor reduced to the stakes of a bum.
0:05:50:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: I like the ship.
0:05:53:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: This is exciting.
0:05:56:>>SUCHIT DASH: So yeah — so it’s probably a little different than the you guys use it. But it’s a fun app. We have about 200 million users around the world who use this app to create these fun videos. They share on social. And we’ve created about 7 billion videos all in less than ten seconds around kind of all these different types of content. And one of the things, you know, is one of those classic startup stories where we turned it live. We have five people in a basement actually in Berlin who kind of turn this thing alive. And the thing took sort of a life of its own. And we started seeing that users were uploading their own audio snippets and audio content coming from content that was just airing the day before. So like State of the Union. People would start uploading quotes or people would upload quotes from the most recent episode of, you know, “Real Housewives” or “Game of Thrones” as an example. And then when we started to talk to many of our users, they not only wanted the audio bit, but they also wanted the video associated with it as well. And they wanted to interact with that video. And so we worked — we actually were probably one of the more recent customers. In Q4, we launched sort of a product where for the first time instead of just giving the audio to the users, we would start giving the video to the users as well. It would be a much better cut, mastered version. And then you would see users kind of playing around with — you know, they played one character. And then you would see the other character as the master video itself coming back and forth. So it’s been really exciting. And we’re actually working pretty heavily now. I have a whole team now that’s focused on kind of the SnapStream ingestion with all these different content coming on a daily basis and then kind of cut into 10 second bits and then put into the application.
0:07:35:>>ERIC COHN: Thank you. Nicole.
0:07:37:>>NICOLE DELLERT: Hi, my name’s Nicole Dellert. I work at Conde Nast. I oversee the editorial operations and performance of Snapchat Discover Channel. So that’s Wired, Self, Vogue, GQ and Teen Vogue. And I’m also in charge of the social news desk. I’m a social news desk in soft news. It’s entertainment. It’s haircuts, celebrities — those sort of things and anything you’re talking about on the Internet. It’s composed of an article writing team and a media team creating MP4s. Those sort of things for specifically social platforms. We use SnapStream primarily during live events. We have a big war room, and we’re basically pitching for red carpet, to the close of the event, to all of our brands. Trending article topics that we think will work or snippets of quotes, speech captions — those sort of things. SnapStream’s been really helpful on the article side from transcripts and Twitter imbeds. So we do Pre-rights for example over performance or of a speech. The second it comes out that transcript is ready. And we can cut that video and cross-reference it with the transcript and get as live as quickly as possible. And then we can go on social as quickly as possible. Because when these sort of situations, it’s whoever’s first is really the winner in this with SEO or social performance. And then on the media side during these live events, we’re cutting moments that we think make sense for the brands, whether that’s an inspirational quote or Blue Ivy telling her mom to calm down. Things like that.
0:09:02:>>ERIC COHN: Brandon.
0:09:04:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: Hi, guys. My name is Brandon. I work at “CBS This Morning,” the national broadcast on CBS. And I’ve been there for about a year and a half. And I’m a social media associate producer. And I’m responsible for live tweeting newscast every morning. And SnapStream has been a huge help in our growth online and getting our content out there because we’re I would say fairly new morning broadcasts compared to our competitors of being on the air for six years now. You know, we’re trying to get our content out and in front as many people as possible. So this is a photo of James Corden who was on our show last week for the Grammys. So we used SnapStream to — you know, basically I would say 90 percent of what’s on our show is on Twitter while it’s airing. So, you know, the A block which is the first 20 minutes of the show — it’s usually the most important news of the morning that you need to know. So I’m clipping. you know, reporters intros. You know, if we have a live interview, getting quotes out. If it’s just a reader about something happening, you know, around the world, we’ll get that out there and sometimes the smallest stories will be our most successful tweet. You know, there are video clips most of the time. Sometimes we do gifs. Sometimes if it’s breaking news we’ll just do an image to get it out quicker. But I use Snapstream for basically everything. It’s one of the most important tools that I use for my job. So…
0:10:29:>>ERIC COHN: Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. When we were putting this panel together, more than anything, we kind of were looking through a thread through all of our panelists here today. And the two really big things that we saw were A, you were all influencing culture in your own different way, some influencing the way you handle medical issues and some literally influencing culture like you may do it at Conde Nast. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to you at your organization? Like, how you see influencing culture or your influence specifically into the zeitgeist? Nicole?
0:11:11:>>NICOLE DELLERT: Yeah. Well the first thing we do is we always try to make sure that we’re in line with editorial voice. Editorial excellence is the most important thing to us. So what we’re creating and producing, especially in this time and age — we are starting to slow down a little bit and asking ourselves the why of video. Like, are we inspiring people? Are we motivating them? Are we just in this rat race of content, content, content? And you’re starting to see that in these Facebook feeds that it’s just a lot of crap. It’s starting to turn into a lot of crap, right? And you can blame my mother because she’s liking all of it and she shares all of it. And so I totally get it. But we have to kind of stop down and ask the why and is this in line with our brands? So that’s something that is always a challenge every day. But it’s also been an interesting shift with the political landscape. Last year when President Obama did a speech, we were, like, killing it on social performance. You cut like 15 seconds of that and everyone is just sharing it and they’re feeling inspired. The speeches now are a little bit different and they’re a little polarizing. And the brands are having to kind of take a step back because they’re not political brands. We know we have to go back to, like, our core and what is our mission? What is the mission of Teen Vogue? What is Allure trying to do? And that’s something that we still are challenged with, especially as we’re working with social media managers and people who are just trying to adhere to a KPI. We need them to stop and take a step back and look at, is this good for the company?
0:12:45:>>ERIC COHN: Redefine KPI for those don’t know.
0:12:46:>>NICOLE DELLERT: Oh, I’m sorry. A key performance index, right? So, ok guys, you need to have X amount of engagement this month and every — at the end of the month, all of a sudden crap is filling the fees. You will see it because they’re trying — they don’t want to get in trouble. And the social media managers, in my opinion, like, they’re the backbone of these organizations because they’re essentially marketing and they’re getting all the content out. But they’re also the first people that are going to get in trouble when there’s a mess up? How could you do that? And usually those people are saying how could you do that have no idea how to tweet, right? So it’s — so it’s a lot of — for our team, we come in as a partner to the brands as collaborators, and we want to make sure that it’s a safe place of creation and that we’re going to protect our social media managers, too, and still adhere to speed.
0:13:33:>>ERIC COHN: Anybody else want to comment?
0:13:35:>>SUCHIT DASH: Yes so we — you know, what’s interesting for us is that we’re very much — our user base takes culture and then kind of turns that on top of its head, right? And we very much are, like, almost like a remix platform. And what’s interesting is they — you know, what we notice is that our demographic is largely under 24. It’s about 60 percent of our users are under 24. And what we’ve noticed is that, as much as you want to give them kind of these seeds to be able to kind of build off of. They will sort of take it and they want to do their own creations and they want to create. They don’t want to just simply passively consume what is given to them. They want to take it and they want to make it into their own, personalize it, and then they want to send it to their friends. And that’s a very different — you know, we even look at our own internal data where, like, last year we had about 2 billion video views inside our app. If you look at where the concentration of that was, 25-plus consumed a lot more and 24 and under created a lot more. So they created a lot more of these videos. And so I think what we always challenge ourselves with is we work, obviously, very closely with a lot of content owners and content providers. How do you — how do you provide or facilitate this type of exchange where people want to create, but obviously there’s sensitivities with the brands themselves about taking back content and doing something potentially objectionable with it? And so, you know, we have things that we’ve put in place, like keeping a team that curates a lot of this content, making sure that it’s, you know, brand-safe, that we’re not letting a lot of this objectionable content get out there. And I think that is going to become an increasing challenge because the demand from users that are under 24 is to really shape the culture, not necessarily be fed sort of the culture that’s out there.
0:15:19:>>ERIC COHN: Thank you so much. Brandon, I want to ask you and Joe, you know, you guys really have a need for incredibly, incredibly quick video turned around. Could you talk a little bit about what that means at CBS and what that means at MLS? How — why — why? Why, and what potentially can go wrong and go can go right when you’re turning things around that quickly?
0:15:41:>>JOE ATKINSON: So the speed for us is is kind of a dual-edged sword. One, we’re at the mercy of broadcasts. So when we first introduced Snapstream and the ability to send clips to the sideline, the doctors were like, heck no. I’m not going to let a video tell me what I want to do. And through the course of the season, the transition from, I’m not — I don’t even want the video to, oh, can I get the video faster? Can I get — can I get three or four different views? I mean, how much content can you send me? And then even to the point now, at the end of last season, we had them — we have an internal dialogue between the soccer operation center SOC and the teams, and they would text back or they would send us a message saying, hey, this play happened, or this player got hurt in this minute at this time, and we’re able to go back and use the search and search for that guys key word through the subtitle text, grab that clip and then send it down to the doc, so he’s actually at half times asking for three or four different videos so that when a player comes in and says hey, I got dinged, I want to be — I want to get checked out to OK, I want to see what happened to make sure that things are matching up. And it went from I don’t even want to use it, it’s the dumbest thing ever, I hate it, to why is it not here faster? Why can I not have this instantaneously? Why — you should be able to read my thoughts and get it out to me. So it was a real transition. And especially working with doctors who don’t like to transition at all, it was kind of fun to see them buy into the system and get some feedback on it.
0:17:10:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: Joe, why do you bother to transcode it if you want it to get there fast? It’s already been on TV. What’s the…?
0:17:15:>>JOE ATKINSON: So we use that when we’re going back to — when we’re going back to research — when they’ve asked for a different video. So the livestream that we send, the cut and clip that goes fast, is stuff that we internally see and want the doctor to have eyes on. The stuff that we use the encode for is when they come back and say, you know, Amarone got hit in the 23rd minute at this point. Can you send me a copy of that video? Which was something we didn’t have or didn’t feel needed to be sent down. It’s just something they’re asking for.
0:17:40:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: It’s been on TV. Why encode it? It takes time.
0:17:44:>>JOE ATKINSON: It’s — well -
0:17:45:>>NICOLE DELLERT: It’s a medical record.
0:17:46:>>JOE ATKINSON: Yeah, it’s a medical record.
0:17:47:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: But it’s been on broadcast TV.
0:17:50:>>JOE ATKINSON: But it gets uploaded to the medical file. It’s one thing that — I just came from a different conference where we were talking about that — when does it become — what becomes — what’s protected and what isn’t protected? And it’s that whole space they don’t — with the ability of guys sitting on Twitter feeds and video like that, who does that content belong to? Does it belong to the athlete or who does it belong to? So we encode it right now just because we don’t know yet who it belongs to and who has the rights to it.
0:18:18:>>ERIC COHN: You were telling me a little bit about the — about when they pulled people out of games. You really have essentially three minutes, right?
0:18:26:>>JOE ATKINSON: So there’s an unwritten, or there is a suggested rule in the world of soccer that, if a potential head injury comes in, you’ve got — the refs will stop the game for three minutes, and the doc’s got to make a decision in three minutes — does this player stay or does this player go? And so we are trying to push that forward because we had two issues happen this season where a home club doc got the video feed after he’d gone out and cleared the player and said oh, wait. This doesn’t — something was funky in here and pulled the player off to the side and gave him a secondary screening, which wasn’t that big of a deal. But we had a big deal when the opposing team had a guy who went down. They screened him, said he was good. He came off. The doc got the video and said, hey, wait a second. And it blew up in the world because the coach called the doctor — or called the doctor out saying he was being gamesmanship, that he was pulling his best player out and they were going to lose the game. And, you know, we’re talking — it was in the playoffs, so we’re talking millions of dollars that were pushing around based on the simple feed, and so the speed for us is a huge deal because I need to get that to him so the doc can have it before he goes out and screens.
0:19:28:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN # 5: Why wouldn’t you just have a doctor up in the SOC center looking at the video feed and communicating with another doctor on the field?
0:19:34:>>JOE ATKINSON: So with head injuries…
0:19:36:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN # 5: (Unintelligible).
0:19:40:>>JOE ATKINSON: …Because with soccer, with head injuries and concussions in particular, it’s a very unique injury. And the fact that somebody who doesn’t know a player and doesn’t know his history, doesn’t know what happened during practice, doesn’t know what happened during the course of the week sees something, he may make a call that the person who has been dealing with that player or that athlete throughout the course of the week or the season may know something different. And so it’s very hard with concussions to base it solely on a visible sign. There’s a lot of — there’s a SCAT test that we do. There’s a pen and pencil battery that goes into it. So there’s a myriad of different tests that go into that process. And unlike other sports, soccer is unique in the fact that if a guy gets hurt playing basketball or football and the doc on the sidelines says hey, bring this guy out, so he can look at him — guy comes out, they screen him and they put him back in, in soccer, when they come out, they stay out. They don’t get to go back in. And so it’s got to be done. It’s got to be quick. It’s got to be done. And the evaluation has to be done and complete because if they pull that player off, he doesn’t get to go back on. And so you take out your best player and now in the first 30 minutes or first 10 minutes of the game, now you get play an additional 80 minutes of the game without your best player. And so it’s unique in the fact that we have to get it to them so that they can — it’s — and a physician in New York isn’t doing that on field screening, which is the more important piece to it. That modified SCAT that we have.
0:21:01:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN # 5: So you’re in New York, not on-site?
0:21:02:>>JOE ATKINSON: No we’re not on site. We’re based out of New York. I would — trust me, my wife would hate me if I flew to every game. She already hates me now.
0:21:11:>>ERIC COHN: Brandon, let me hear your take on this, especially, you know, being quick and being accurate when it comes to being the news. Please.
0:21:18:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: So speed is very important. You know, our show starts at 7:00 A.M. And, you know, right when our show starts, we do the clipping, going to the rundown, looking for language, and speed’s important because if we have a news making interview or are reporting new information nobody else has, you know, our show’s known for it’s hard news format compared to our competitors. They cover a lot more entertainment along with news. But our show is known for its two hours of just full news. So we have a different perspective at the table. We have a different voice. And sometimes someone will say something that’s newsmaking, something someone else didn’t know. So we have a lot of journalists who also watch our show, including networks. But they’ll sometimes tweet or try to scoop us off of our own story. So it’s important for me to get it out from our brand right away. I need to make sure the quote is right. Is it accurate? Is my spelling OK? Do I have the right Twitter handle? All these things are going into my mind as I’m preparing the tweet. I probably read the tweet and like fact check it like six times before it goes out there just to make sure because, you know, the last thing you want to do is have someone e-mail, oh, this is wrong or have to take down a tweet or have a typo because Twitter won’t give us an edit button yet. But that’s another conversation. I mean, it’s very important. You know, you have to keep in mind when you’re cutting a video, it’s not going to be instant. It does take a minute or two. You’ve got to explain that to the higher ups sometimes, and they’re like hey, why isn’t this clip out? It’s like, I’m working on it. It will be out shortly because that one minute does make a difference. So it’s, you know, if we want it out I would say instantly, we can do a photo because photos — you know, it’s less due process than a video clip. But yeah, speed is very important if you want to be right, want to be accurate. We’ve going to protect the brand. CBS are known for being the prestigious brand. I have a question.
0:23:06:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: What’s the approval (unintelligible)?
0:23:11:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: So — well if it’s on — if it’s on the broadcast, you know, it’s good to go on social. I mean, there are certain clips. You know, I chat on Slack. Anybody here use Slack? Raise your hand. If love Slack keep your hand up. So I’m Slacking away in the morning our web editor saying hey is this clip cleared? Sports footage, we never touch. Music, we don’t touch. If it’s like a third party footage that we didn’t necessarily authorize for web, sometimes they just clear stuff for broadcast. We try not to, but there’s instances where it’s only for broadcast, then I can’t use that clip. So I’ll do maybe a screenshot with a quote or not use the full video. But as far as language, I try to stick to what’s in the show to keep it consistent because that stuff has been processed and has been seen by different barriers in the organization — fact check, executive producer, senior producers, the writers. So I try to stick to that stuff. If it’s something light, you know, there’s times where I do write my own language. If I’m not sure I have a team — our web team. I’ll say, hey, how does this sound? And just have an extra eye at it if I’m — like, I’m not sure.
0:24:14:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: (Unintelligible).
0:24:18:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: Yeah. I have the final — yeah. I press tweet and it’s out there. It’s my button.
0:24:23:>>ERIC COHN: One thing I love is about maybe a month ago, I was watching CBS this morning and I see someone in the background literally like sitting — sitting behind Gayle or something using snapstream and I go, hey, man. I grabbed a screenshot using snapstream and said, hey — I said hey, guy using snapstream, I see you over there or something like that. And Brandon immediately responded, hey, that’s me. So if you’re watching in the morning you can literally — I mean, and that’s another — yeah, you can see the back of his head and using and clipping. But my question for you is it extra stressful sitting 10 feet from the anchors and doing your work? I mean, I guess you got to be quieter.
0:25:03:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: I wouldn’t say stressful. I would say more adrenaline. You know, you’re in the middle of everything. I think it’s more exciting. I have a headset, so — if you watch, I usually have a headset and then I have it in my ear. I have snap stream playing back and then I have in the other ear what’s live and also have our executive producer so I can hear — he’s, you know, in the control room. He’s talking live. So if he says something or he didn’t like something or if there was a mistake because mistakes happen. It’s live TV — the reporter says something they were supposed to or they’re going to edit it for the West Coast, I need to listen to what he’s saying so I know if that’s on social media, take it down or not put it out there. So I’m kind of listening to three things at once. And when I was first training for the job, I was like, oh my god. This is not going to work out. How can I listen to three different things at the same time? But you kind of get used to it. You get into the workflow. You get into a system. And then yeah. Speed’s important, but I’ve always been told, like, yes, if it’s not, like, you know, a huge news making moment, just make sure you’re right and get it out there. But they just — when I train people below me now, like, some of our interns or our broadcast associates, because I want everyone to learn how to live tweet, you know, I tell them, like, yes. It’s important to get it out quickly, but make sure we’re right, accurate, no typos and it looks clean before we rush to get some (unintelligible).
0:26:18:>>ERIC COHN: When you’re — when you’re choosing your video strategy or when you’re coming up with video strategy — this is for all you who work in social — are you listening to what people are asking you for? Are you trying to set the agenda? I hate to use the word agenda, but how do you figure out your video strategy? Suchit, excuse me, are you listening to the people who are using the software or the app and seeing what they want?
0:26:42:>>SUCHIT DASH: Yeah, so we — I mean, we’re a very product first organization. We iterate on our product pretty much daily. And, you know, I think the challenge that I think all of us probably faces — we’re an independent application. So we have our own kind of standalone app. We don’t push a lot of our — we really don’t publish any content out to, you know, that we create onto Facebook or Instagram or some of these others. Our users will post their creations on those applications, and then we’ll see a lot of users coming back in through these funnels. But I think one of the things that we obviously focus on and that I’m — you know, spend most of my time on is figuring out the next three to five years, what does video look like? And where — what’s the modality that people are going to start consuming it on? And really obviously just in our own internal data that we’ve seen, you know, from 2016 and 2017 for perspective on our app, we had — you know, we ended 2016 with about 800 million views inside our app and then we ended 2017 with like almost two point seven billion. And it’s largely just due to the fact that like — that wasn’t due to any shift in strategy that we necessarily did, although we did provide more video content. It was consumers’ behavior and wanting to watch more and more content on their — on their phones. And I think that’s — largely when you look at user generated content, the way you consume with Instagram stories or snapchat stories — they’re going through that at a much higher frequency every single day for a shorter period of time, but constantly checking back in versus sitting down and being like I’m going to watch, let’s say, 15 minutes at one time. And I think the question is, how do you change programming accordingly? And that’s where we’re spending a lot of our time thinking about, how do you take a lot of this content, slice it into even thinner slices than we even think about, like, going from episode to clip — how do you even go from clip to even shorter than that? And then get it into a really bite sized format that they can consume? And that’s the way we think about it, from a strategy perspective, where we’re headed. I can’t say that we’ve by any means figured it out. I think we would be the gazillionaires that someone was talking about earlier if we did.
0:28:48:>>NICOLE DELLERT: Just being like general social video strategy — because YouTube and all those — those are different platforms with different revenue — every platform is different. Every brand is different. How I deal with my team is I separate into brand leads and I make these people have ownership and pride in that brand and they are going to own that and voice and make sure it’s aligned with the social media manager and everything that they’re needing. And I break it into quarters so we can pivot quickly. My strategy — I think you have to pivot, especially with social. You have to see what works and then change it up. There is no one rule book. And as you’re seeing companies evolve and turn more into this digital media, you have to explain that to them, right? It’s not just an image with text on it. It’s like OK, so have you heard of motion graphics? Okay. So like are we hiring people with motion graphic skills? And especially with IG stories now and snap chat, that movement is important and you’re learning how to tell visual stories and to answer your question earlier about how you get people to understand the importance of video, I think you have to speak their language and be like, this is just an extension of your own storytelling. I want to tell the story that you already have. I want to tell the edits — the editorial that you already have. This can help build upon it. A lot of people, in my experience, that don’t understand video or don’t want video are people that probably don’t have experience making it. So you kind of have to put a hand across there and to show them that this really isn’t scary. I want to teach you what a cinemagraph is. It’s not going to change anything editorially. It’s just -
0:30:17:>>ERIC COHN: Do you want to tell everybody what a cinemagraph is?
0:30:19:>>NICOLE DELLERT: OK. It’s when you have a beautiful image and you have a piece of movement in there. Ideally, you can shoot it in advance that way. So like, for example, there could be a still here and just your pen moving. So it’s like — so it can be interesting, especially when you’re looking at brands like Architectural Digest or Conde Nast Traveler. Like, they can be like really gorgeous. But you know with Conde Nast, of course, there’s photography rights. And you always have — there’s a lot of pieces. Anytime you think there’s an easy lay-up, it’s like, it hits you in the back of the head. So you have to make sure you have buy in, for sure.
0:30:49:>>ERIC COHN: Great. Do you have something to add here Brandon?
0:30:52:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: Sure. I mean, I think it depends on the form and the algorithm behind it and how you can monetize. We’re a broadcast network. So, you know, we are TV first. We also have our streaming network, CBSN, which is a 24/7 news streaming service. Go to CBS News .com. It’s always playing on the bottom. But it’s, like, you know, Facebook — it’s like every few months you have to change up your strategy because when the algorithm changes, you have to change the way you put your post out. You know, we saw a year ago an increase in the square videos. If you notice why. Now we’re seeing a shift in like some news organizations testing out vertical video because everyone’s using iPhones and their smartphones. I mean, I think it just depends on your company’s mission — how they want to make money. We don’t put everything out on social because we do ultimately — we need to make money off our website and our stream. And, you know, we do want people to go to and watch us on TV. But we also want to give away enough for people to know what we are and check us out.
0:31:52:>>ERIC COHN: First bit’s free, the rest are going to cost you? Nothing. Brandon hit on a good point. Like, how many of you guys are pushed to monetize? I mean, you’re the president, Suchit. I mean, is the push to figure out a way to monetize the video — is that strong at these organizations? Or is it seen as ancillary to what you’re doing? Or…
0:32:15:>>SUCHIT DASH: We have to.
0:32:16:>>ERIC COHN: Of course.
0:32:17:>>SUCHIT DASH: And I think the challenge, probably more than anything else is, especially in mobile video, how do you — how do you figure out a way to make sure that the CPMs don’t completely go down to almost zero. And the increase in inventory that we’re seeing in mobile video is great. The challenge is, how do you get really good ad experiences that fundamentally actually impact users, you know, that they can actually remember? And so the biggest issue that we’re facing also is — it’s great we’re seeing a lot of viewership, but we’re also seeing a lot of users just doing this and tapping through a ton of videos very fast. And they’re tapping through the ads as fast as they tap through the videos themselves, right? So I don’t think — Facebook’s struggling with this, snap’s struggling with this. I think all of us as a platform are struggling with, how do you find the right type of model and ad format that ultimately works? And I think you’re going to see some changes coming from all the platforms to make it so that people pause and spend a little bit more time on there. But I think ultimately, what we’re doing is also working very closely with content owners and taking their content, making it really bite sized, giving them the ability to approve, reject all of this stuff, but ultimately doing that in service so that they can gain more digital inventory to be able to sell against, right? So if you have SNL that goes live, and you’re seeing the full episode, you bring that to the mobile screen where people are seeing it and consuming it kind of like an Instagram story model, but then able to monetize that as effectively as they could be because of the greater inventory that they have access to. Again, it’s, I think, something that we’re all trying to focus on. But I don’t think anyone has the perfect answer.
0:33:54:>>ERIC COHN: Well the last question I have and then we’ll open it up for questions here is, what are you guys most excited about? What’s on the horizon video-wise? What are you — what is the next social media that none of us know about? You know, where is video heading, as you see it?
0:34:10:>>JOE ATKINSON: So for us it’s just all about speed, trying to figure out is there a way that we can take, as these guys have said, take it out of the encoding and get it to the hands faster? Is that, we put a snap box in each of our venues and then put a local guy in there who runs that cut and is on the sidelines and just hands it straight to the doctor (unintelligible) me cutting it and sending. You know, I mean, it’s — for us the way forward is just speed. It’s just sheer speed.
0:34:39:>>ERIC COHN: Suchit?
0:34:41:>>SUCHIT DASH: Yeah, ours is really about how do users interact with content. So it’s not about if there TV was designed today, where it’s very much of a leaned back experience. I think the future is very much of a lean forward and interactive experience where they can take the content and do interesting things with it, whether that be in arcades, putting their face and putting things on top of that, but then actually doing more with it. And I think we’re going to continue to see that envelope push forward.
0:35:09:>>NICOLE DELLERT: I’m excited about visual storytelling and how it keeps evolving in the marketplace, to be honest. I think there’s a million different ways to tell a story. Content is king. And people won’t stop reading. In my opinion, they just won’t. There’s a reason why the New Yorker is the New Yorker. And so if you keep great content as first and visual storytelling as helping to build that rather than be against it, then I think we’ll be in a good place.
0:35:35:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: I’m not excited for Facebook’s huge algorithm change, getting rid of the news. I think 2018 has been an interesting year. You’re starting to see all these reports, which we all knew, that these tech companies are making these apps and it’s contributing to addiction and, you know, young people being addicted to their phones. So, you know, I think they’re going to get more pressure and it’s going to be interesting to see which way they go with at least journalism. You know, you’ve got Facebook watch now. Interesting to see where that goes. There’s talk of them adding ads to those videos soon because, you know, companies want to monetize off their content. I’m interested in what Netflix and Hulu and these apps and the subscription service that you pay for — you know, year to year, they just keep growing and it’s something people don’t mind paying for. I got an e-mail that my Netflix price is going up and it’s like OK. It’s fine. I love it. It’s great. You know, live TV streaming — you’re seeing them being integrated. Now Hulu has live TV with Hulu. DirecTV, they have an app that you just stream. It’s very interesting time for this industry. With video, I think you’re going to see more ads on videos. You know, Twitter already has the preroll on top of your videos, which I think is great because it’s easier to sell that your bosses, like, hey, we can put more content out on line if we’re making X Y Z.
0:36:55:>>ERIC COHN: Which you can now use a snap stream, for the record. Just saying.
0:37:00:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: You know, snap chat — it’s — you know, I think they’re declining a bit. But if they just — the other day, you know, they were all about shooting only on your phone. And then if you’re uploading your camera roll you’d have that ugly white border around. And snapstream came to our office like two months ago to show us the redesign of their app, which I wasn’t impressed. It was like the same thing. But we told them, like, can you get rid of this white boarder? Like, how as a brand are we supposed to put content out? We don’t have a whole team that’s going to be on the field or doing on the scene things. You know, we got lots of video from all over the world’s, it’s a global organization. But if we can upload you know through the app without you know having a huge white border I think that would — because we don’t really focus on snap stream — on snap stream. On snap chat. Big difference. You know, so now a few days ago we did a huge update where they don’t have that white border. So I think they’re starting to see the decline in numbers and saying OK, maybe we should start listening to some brands. So I love Instagram stories — addicted to it. Follow at CBS This Morning. Shameless plug. So we do a lot of fun stories there. And you know, maybe we’ll start cutting back snap chat now that we we are able to upload it from camera roll. So we’ll see. It’s hard to tell. It’s like I’m not sure where the industry’s going to go. Like, who knows? Mark Zuckerberg can wake up tomorrow and change everything else again. And we’ll have to adapt because it’s Facebook.
0:38:20:>>ERIC COHN: Yeah. Who’s got questions? Anybody have questions for our panelists? Please. We’ve got a microphone coming around, I believe. Yes.
0:38:36:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Hello. I’m Aaron, I’m from Newman University. I’ll be graduating in May. So how important, if it is at all, to hire someone that already knows snap stream, has already worked with it?
0:38:47:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: I think it’s — I mean, if I was interviewing four different people, and you said, oh I know how to use snapstream, I know how to live tweet, you’re hired because now I don’t have to spend a couple of weeks training you. Like that’s a great asset.
0:38:59:>>ERIC COHN: So a really good opportunity to give your card and contact information. Yeah. Sorry.
0:39:07:>>NICOLE DELLERT: No, snapstream — I mean, I think the interface is pretty great. So I could teach you how to do snap stream. But I want to know if you have design skills and if you have a visual eye because that’s going to help with my translation a lot.
0:39:19:>>BRANDON LAUNERTS: It depends on what you’re applying for and what it is for. Like, if it’s more creative…
0:39:23:>>NICOLE DELLERT: Yeah.
0:39:24:>>JOE ATKINSON: Believe it or not, from our standpoint, when we were bringing in athletic trainers to do that spotter program, that was one of the questions we asked — do you even know what snap stream is? And if they gave us that blank dumbfound look, it’s just like, all right please move to the side because I don’t have time — when you’ve got nine games going on at the same time, you don’t have time to troubleshoot this thing. They need to know how to do it and get it pushed to them as fast as possible. So it was actually — for us, it was actually one of the requirements they had to — at least have heard of the system so that we could push it forward.
0:39:51:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: Was it was it difficult to find people that had heard of it?
0:39:54:>>JOE ATKINSON: For athletic trainers, it was very, very difficult. They don’t live in the IT world. They were like oh, can we send it through Facebook? No. You can’t send it through Facebook. But we did — we did bring him in. We actually did run into a part where we didn’t have him and had to bring in a few extra, and we had to put them through some training on the system and do test runs with them prior to them going. So they were actually starting a — I think they started — we started them in week nine of the season, so it took nine weeks of us having them come in and work side by side with guys who had actually used it. That way we’d get that speed and the quickness down.
0:40:27:>>ERIC COHN: Any other questions? Please.
0:40:30:>>UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: This is more for Dubsmash. So you’re, you know, clipping stuff right fresh. How are you doing with the intellectual property part of that?
0:40:38:>>SUCHIT DASH: So what we do is we actually enable — all of these quotes get uploaded into kind of a back-end system that we actually work with the content owner. They have the ability to approve, reject, they can do whatever they want with it. They can take things down. We’ve gotten pretty good about it. We never had anything with music, as an example, which is a big challenge. And then everything we’re cutting is — we’re actually doing in less than 10 seconds. A lot of cases there’s a 10 second fair use rule.
0:41:11:>>ERIC COHN: I saw another question? Please.
0:41:13:>>UNIDENTIFIED MAN #9: I had a question regarding Dubsmash. You guys sort of — it involves you bringing up the amount of garbage that tends to come out. For clips and stuff like that, you bring up the idea that people are just cycling through and not spending any time. Are you guys seeing a correlation? You know, I believe the companies — your company came out with the idea that let’s give everyone the ability to do whatever they want. And I feel like we’re now seeing a reversal of that because too many people are doing what they want and what they want is not good. And I wonder how that’s going to run in the ability to monetize because no one hangs out long enough because they see it and they assume see you later. So I wonder if you have thoughts on that.
0:42:04:>>SUCHIT DASH: So my perspective on this is very much around curation and a curated experience versus necessarily keeping an open platform. And I think the challenge that you see Facebook and many of these companies, which is different — like snap actually has a different philosophy on this versus Instagram and Facebook and even Google at that phase, which is very machine learning driven, algorithmic decision making versus any level of human curation that’s involved. And I think we’ve sampled both. I personally still believe there is a world where human curation is incredibly important. And I actually believe that, especially when you’re dealing with user generated content and you’re seeing the challenges with YouTube with brand safety, you’re seeing challenges with Facebook. I think there needs to be that. And actually snap has — you know, does a lot of human curation. So I sort of took — you know, we’ve built a team of almost 30 to 35 people around the world. We’re doing human curation around content that gets submitted. They’re looking at thousands of videos every single day, every hour, basically, and also selecting really good content that people actually want to watch. I can tell you, we have a lot of videos that it’s not worth watching and people are just creating for themselves. And I think that that’s where you need to give that level of dedication to your brand advertiser to then give them a good enough experience for them to have — to actually even want to put an advertisement next to your content. And I think that that’s a layer where, as much as we all are trying to go for view ability and visibility, it’s a challenge because over time that starts to erode. And so I think you need to couple great experiences together. And that’s honestly where TV got it really right, is TV did the better the programming, the better the ad rates. And I think in mobile it’s not really like that right now. And so we’ve got to kind of have a little bit of an adjustment.
0:43:51:>>NICOLE DELLERT: I think with Conde Nast, you know, probably about two years ago you saw that we had a lot of likes on Facebook, for example. But they were actually vanity likes. It’s really cool to like GQ, but then you post a link and you’re getting 15 likes and you’re like something’s not right here. And so then we realize we need to engage the audience and so we started getting to the speed of engagement and which would then lead to scale and ideally theoretically come back to traffic. But now we’re slowing down here and really rethinking our audience because we’re getting the engagement. We’re getting the scale, but this person doesn’t — they’re not the GQ reader. And so we can’t just, you know, chase the social tale if it doesn’t match our editorial content. So we have to make sure that it matches every single time. And you’ll see this with Allure — if they’re posting something that’s not make-up or self-care related, why are you — why did you posted? Because you want people to tag their friends? It’s not worth it. So take that down. I’d rather not have that and we have something that actually builds a true, authentic audience that will keep coming back and then go to the site and read. They come to, you know, know what to expect from us.
0:44:58:>>ERIC COHN: Any other questions? I want to thank our panelists very much, very interesting discussion. We’re going to take a — we’re going to take about a 10 minute break. Please get a drink. Have some coffee. Use the restroom, if there’s any keys left. And we’ll get going again in about ten minutes. Thanks again, guys.
