Sightworthy Leads the Charge for Inclusive Short-Form Video

Nearly a year into a global pandemic, we continue to see startups leading in a crisis, adapting their business models, products, and services to serve this new world. Among these pivots, R/GA Ventures’ portfolio company Sightworthy had to rethink their product offerings to better serve their clients.

Sightworthy connects brands and agencies to its on-demand global network of editors who spin existing assets into timely content for every platform, to create videos fast and at scale. Their team of editors has worked with brands spanning from Mercedes to Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

Sightworthy has had to rethink and build an even faster, more efficient, and succinct way to repurpose content. Last year, Sightworthy saw an opportunity to launch a new self-serve video tool called Shuffle, what they’re calling “the smartest content repurposing engine in the world.” All workflows are built to turn footage, images, script, or audio into short-form video for every channel leveraging its global network of editors.

We sat down with Sightworthy’s Founder & CEO, Aneri Shah to learn more about how they’ve had to adapt, the importance of diversity, and their future product roadmap.

Sightworthy is at the center of optimizing the video creation process. Can you describe how Sightworthy works with brands?

We provide two pathways for brands:

1. Sightworthy Classic: A fully managed video creation service.

Our managed service model provides a modern online brief allowing customers to upload raw media and photos, and select things like tone and KPIs for each video. For every submitted brief, the customer will be connected to a dedicated account manager to help manage the creative process with the editor.

1. Shuffle: A brand to editor matching platform to generate 6–15s videos at scale.

This self-serve tool connects brands to the perfect editor for each video. It provides a series of proven video templates, stock media, vibe selection, and access to native social video fonts proven to lift conversion for our editors.

With a guided experience and a matching algorithm that connects customers to the perfect editor based on their selected vibe and source content, customers can get video back in as quick as 12 hours, push directly to social channels, and collect data in real-time.

Shuffle is built specifically to streamline creation for 6–15s video ads, making it fun for every marketer in the world rather than arduous. Monthly access to Shuffle starts at $99/mo.

What video-related trends have shaped Sightworthy’s product roadmap?

The original idea for Sightworthy came from the explosion of Vine in 2015. We predicted that the current brand production processes we were seeing (i.e., corporate video, big budgets, and lengthy creative briefs) would eventually have to evolve to keep up. Here’s an article from 2017 where we go into depth on this concept.

Although Vine was shut down in early 2017, the seed for short-form, creative and wacky videos had been planted.

Vine paved the way for platforms like Snapchat. In 2016, when Snapchat got even bigger with 161M daily users, and Instagram Stories launched and quickly hit 500M daily users, the world of video irreversibly changed.

The average big brand we spoke to was spending 6 weeks and upwards of $8,000 on a single 6–15s video ad. Given how quickly people were consuming vertical video stories, we knew brands would have to phase out these old slow video production methods in favor of technology and processes that promote speed and feed-stopping creativity.

So we built an on-demand video editor network hand-selected specifically for their ability to repurpose content into creative short-form video quickly. We call them portfolio builders, visionaries, and influencers. Young editors that have are native to social and have put in the time to understand what types of stories resonate and how to tell them through video.

This approach helped us become the Instagram Stories and Snapchat video ad creation go-to for marketing teams all over the world.

Then TikTok exploded. TikTok changed the game in two big ways. They put out significantly better editing tools directly in their app, thus broadening their creator pool to literally everyone and ushering in a new era of truly wacky authenticity. They also led with music, which is a core differentiator from Snapchat and Instagram. On TikTok, music is the primary determinant around which videos get engagement and reach virality.

This market evolution definitely evolved our roadmap. We quickly realized that stock music (i.e. corporate-sounding) clips from legacy platforms don’t cut it anymore. We need access to fresh beats and updating signals from social platforms to help customers capitalize on trends.

So on the backend, we are now working on integrating with parts of TikTok’s Music API and pulling in tracks from newer-age stock music platforms. There are a lot! It’s been cool to see how many have popped up, also in response to the trends TikTok has set forth.

On a more philosophical level, as platforms like TikTok and Instagram make video more fun and the music more inclusive, our platform and our roadmap is becoming more fun and inclusive with it, which brands love. I know I might be biased, but the plethora of South Asian tracks available on TikTok along with the emphasis on movement and dance is my dream come true.

We know that Sightworthy prides itself on the diversity of its editor network. How does diversity in the editors you source reflected in the overall outputs of the videos?

Great question. Our editor network spans over 30 countries and 48 U.S. cities and we’ve heavily focused on recruiting womxn and BiPOC editors in addition to diversifying by location. It matters to us not just what our community looks like, but the diversity of experiences they’ve had, which inevitably shows up in their creative choices and artistry as they’re spinning up content.

When a U.S. based company wants to advertise to an audience in, say, Nigeria. It feels complicated to hire a crew in said location, find the right actors, and then find the right editor to make the video “feel” like it’s for this audience. So instead, most brands end up making something generic.

Shuffle’s modern online brief gives brands the opportunity to select the specific audience they’re targeting, down to gender, race, and even ethnicity. Based on those inputs, our system then matches them to an editor from the right location, in this case, Nigeria. We’ve found that editors will make certain creative choices based on who they themselves are, which deeply impacts the video output in terms of authenticity, style, pacing, and media & music selection.

There is currently a skincare brand using Shuffle to target audiences in India, and instead of the video having a standard corporate track, the editor in India found South Asian tracks to use and we’re excited to see the conversion lift.

When it comes to diversity, we’ve clearly gone deeper and treat it as more than just a buzzword. For me, diversity being reflected in content is deeply personal. As a first-generation South Asian, I recognize that it’s not just about representation, but about the feeling a video story can evoke. We’ve prioritized getting that vibe just right.

With many film crews being out of work since the pandemic, can you walk us through how Sightworthy saw this as an opportunity to support the industry? What features have been added to accommodate the current video production landscape?

For the last few years, we’ve been educating brands on the idea that filming every video project in person with a crew is unnecessary, especially when producing short-form (and even long-form) videos for digital. Not only is it expensive and slow, sometimes the content is hard to optimize for mobile.

Prior to the pandemic, brands and agencies were slow to adopt this mindset. Now, the transition to alternative, safer, and more agile methods of production has been incredibly swift. It’s astounding.

Customers who once said they “don’t have enough content to repurpose”, found troves in old hard drives and DAMs that were once forgotten. After getting set up and using Shuffle a few times, they became converts much faster than they might have pre-pandemic while also saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive shoots.

We also broadened our customer base to customers with little to no visual assets. We added a Shoot From Home video training over Zoom to our service repertoire. One of our customers, an insurance brand, took this training and had each of their employees shoot footage from home. They then used our repurposing engine to turn that iPhone video into beautiful LinkedIn videos.

The Head of Marketing said, “I can’t believe we ever used in-person studios. This looks almost too good!”

They now also have hundreds of videos to work with that might have taken them years to produce prior to the pandemic.

It’s cool to see companies, even those in conservative industries, get crafty and creative so fast.

What early success have you been able to deliver to brands with your new products?

We’ve been able to help brands spin up Instagram and TikTok ads within days simply by providing a few footage clips, photos, or even just links to blog posts.

Here is a video made for The Juggernaut, A South Asian focused media company. The source was simply a link to a blog post along with a few screenshots, and this is what came out. For them, the game-changer was the music selection for these videos. Beyond the hard stats, the win was around being open to testing different types of music tracks to see what resonates with their audience, something they hadn’t considered before.

Here is a video made for Rayea’s Touch, a black-owned beauty brand that was able to create this video in a day and generate heightened awareness through Instagram stories and Twitter, using the insights to build her advertising strategy. With a limited budget, Rayea’s Touch was able to create a beautiful video and the initial buds of a scalable video advertising plan.

Even the early results are so exciting! The possibilities here are endless.

Check out this video done from remixing stop motion videos — it’s beautifully done and at a fraction of the cost of doing original stop motion. Pre-pandemic, brands always think they have to start video from scratch, which just isn’t true.

If you’re a brand or agency looking to spin up stunning video ads, head to Sightworthy’s website to get started.

R/GA Ventures helps corporate partners tap into innovation through the startup ecosystem. Over the past six years, R/GA Ventures has facilitated dozens of transformative projects between our portfolio companies and major corporations — all meaningful work that proves new ground and creates lasting business impact.

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