Personalized videos and how to use them

Reading: 8 mins

In recent years, personalization has penetrated more and more into marketing communication as messages with an individual touch are seen as a more effective and efficient way of engaging with an audience. These days, no one is surprised to receive an email based on their user data, and websites or banner advertising are also often personalized. However, personalization had avoided being incorporated into advertising video, mainly for technical reasons. Here Filip Koubek from Motionlab talks about how this is now all changing.

The creative process of creating each ad video always starts in the same way: by defining the target group. But what does that actually mean?

For a traditional advert, thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people need to be targeted en masse based on common characteristics and interests. But just because people are the same age, live in the same city or shop in the same store, it doesn't mean they're all the same. Such general simplification is sufficient for many brands, but there are situations where it isn't enough. When adverts try to be universal for everyone, they often don't have enough impact to grab people's attention and the message gets lost. 

Market segmentation is already quite common, but now we can go much further and personalize videos on a truly individual level. Companies, agencies and production companies are now starting to be aware of this potential and devising campaigns based around the concept. To create personalized video campaigns that really help brands build a true customer relationship, two key elements need to come together: technology and creativity.

Technology

Although creativity is the element that has the strongest impact on the viewer from a marketing perspective, the success of a campaign is mainly determined by whether the videos are rendered correctly and whether each user receives their own personalized video. "It took us several years to explore and develop this process, which then evolved into Motionlab, a cloud platform that can generate hundreds of thousands of unique videos in a short time," explains Filip Koubek.

Motionlab's first success came in 2018 with a newsletter campaign that kicked off the ticket pre-sales for Marketing Festival. A video was embedded in each email sent out and in it, the founder of the conference, Jindrich Faborsky, invited the viewer to attend the festival in Prague which would bring together over 2,000 experts, mainly from the digital marketing field. However, the embedded video was unique for each visitor who had visited the festival before. It felt as if Jindřich Fáborský had recorded it just for them and people responded to this innovation.

The video works with a combination of dynamic scenes, voiceover, lyrics and images. Each video varies depending on which previous years of the Marketing Festival the participant had attended. Some of the speakers of the Marketing Festival also took part in the campaign, such as the world-famous behavioural economist Dan Ariely, creative dynamo Michal Pastier and web usability expert Jan Rezac. Other speakers included one of Mark Ritson's best marketing professors, Christopher Wylie, who exposed the illegal activities of Cambridge Analytica, and SEO expert Wil Reynolds. Each personalized video would therefore contain input from experts who could address each person's specific field of interests.
Check out an overview of the campaign here.

But putting it all together required several technological conditions. "One of them was a thoroughly prepared dynamic template and the right data in CRM or another data source. If the data is not correct and you can't rely on it, a personalized campaign can do more harm than good, " explains Filip Koubek.

Based on the data embedded in the dynamic template, the Motionlab Platform can prepare each video and then deliver it to storage. Thanks to having its own player, it is possible to insert the video into each individual subpage. For example, in the case of the Marketing Festival campaign, not only were 3,500 videos created, but also the same number of microsites for each user. The delivery itself then takes place by email or is integrated into platforms or applications. All interactions are measured and the statistics of each of the thousands of videos can be evaluated.

In addition to this "campaign" approach, where videos are created in advance, personalized videos can also be rendered when requested by the customer. A good example of this is a video inserted into the order confirmation from an e-shop, which is based on the data filled in with an order. With the latest technology, such a video can be created in just seconds.

Creativity

In addition to the technical element, personalized videos need to place even more emphasis on creativity than usual. Early personalized video campaigns resembled the first TV commercials. They showed a static, hanging banner on the screen for the duration of the advertisement - because this was how it had always been done in printed media.

Personalized video is a new format that requires a new approach. "In most misconceived campaigns, the video is overloaded with viewer name tags. It then almost immediately reveals the personalization that is generated and the video ceases to interest the viewer,” explains Koubek. Examples of such personalized videos are some campaigns from Idomoo  - one of the world's largest platforms for personalizing videos.

"I'm not saying that such personalized videos can't be effective. But they only have one scenario and then change the data. They don't really make full use of the potential of personalization. The technology is now advancing rapidly to give us more possibilities"
adds Koubek. 

It's just for you

According to Koubek, the key to success is to create content in which the viewer really feels that the video is only about him and for him. Credibility is crucial.

Using this approach, videos were also created for Marketing Festival, where the various scenes differed based on the input data. The variations were determined by whether the attendee had already bought a ticket or not but also based on their workshop preferences. "When we didn't have data, the video was 40 seconds long. When we had the data, it was a minute and a half, " Koubek explains.

But working with names also threw up some challenges. "Czech language can be complex and first names are different when used in the nominative and vocative forms. So we had to find a creative solution that combined spoken and visual uses of each person's name to get around this."

The shot when Jindra Faborsky's hand was holding a badge with the personalized name was screen-grabbed by some of the attendees and then shared on their social media.
Source: Facebook / Tomas Nawar

Personalization that adapts automatically

 Filip Koubek thinks that real creativity in personalized videos is not necessarily just about ego-baiting. Perhaps even more interesting is the potential to automatically adapt the scene of the creative ad to best suit the current audience and situation. For example, a video ad that responds to a search query or adapts creatively to the current local situation.

What could that look like? Imagine a scenario where a second-hand car dealership with a nationwide branch network has a video advertisement prepared in advance. In the ad, the brand introduction is the same throughout the country, but individual sections of the spot will differ from region to region. And it could show, for example, a Skoda Rapid or a Hyundai i30, depending on what the targeted user was looking for.

Such advertising is based on the user's purchasing intentions. This can provide him with a more relevant, personalized message in a video format, which has far greater persuasiveness than simple text or display search advertising.

Being GDPR ready

If we are talking about real personalization on the level of specific users and not just segmentation, then working with personal data is unavoidable. This must be considered when designing the entire platform architecture in order to comply with the demanding legislation and regulation known as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) - new laws introduced by the EU to protect people's data privacy. When Motionlab undertakes a campaign, only authorized persons have access to personal data, all data is stored in the cloud (such as Microsoft Azure) for a limited period of time and is deleted immediately after the end of the campaign. e.g. the client remains in control of the database and gives admin access to Motionlab.

Many people give brands their online consent to the use of their personal information for newsletters or marketing purposes. But in advertising, consent can be a tricky issue with some grey areas. There are cases of tourists who walked in the back of a scene in a commercial who have sued and received considerable compensation for what they see as violation of their privacy. The prudent and cautious approach is that anyone who appears in an advertisement (even if for just a split-second) must sign an agreement that they consent to the public use of their image.

But according to Filip Koubek, this doesn't apply to the personalized video campaigns realized by Motionlab "According to legal analysis that we carried out, a personalized video is deemed the equivalent of a customized newsletter. If a particular viewer shares it, they are doing so of their own free will, " he said, adding that each microsite is theoretically available to anyone who knows the URL but this URL can't be found publicly as it is hashed.

Summary

Personalized videos can allow even the largest brands with hundreds of thousands of customers to communicate one on one, building much stronger relationships with their customers. New advances in technology mean they are now a perfect tool for reviving an order confirmation, upsell, loyalty program or campaign. In order to do so effectively, it's always necessary to have the data prepared correctly and to be GDPR ready.

This blogpost was adapted from a 2019 article in Marketing Journal

Danny Holman, Motionlab