The SmartVideo Blog

Last week marked a very exciting milestone for SundaySky, as we hosted our first annual SmartVideo Summit. This was the inaugural assembly of SmartVideo first-movers and innovators from the areas of Digital Marketing and Customer Experience – a mix of executives from existing SmartVideo customers, those companies in planning stages, as well as partners.

If you read our 2012 State of Online Video Report, then you are familiar with our 2013 prediction that CMOs will enhance customer experience and engagement strategies with smarter applications of personalized video. But let me give you a deeper dive into additional predictions for online video technologies that are sure to prosper in the coming 12 months…

 “We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting, till the end”

I’d love to tell you our customers sing Queen to us in support of SmartVideo. (Maybe they do?!) Regardless, our customers not only support and root for SmartVideo programs within their organizations, they help educate their colleagues and cross-functional departments on how SmartVideo can be deployed across their brand through their customer’s lifecycle – from customer conversion and acquisition through customer care, support and retention.

Last week I introduced SundaySky's video generator and explained some of its performance characteristics. Today I'll discuss how SmartVideo is driven by data, and the ways in which it adapts to data variation.

Over the last 20 years, the web has evolved from static, manually written pages to computer generated pages, driven by data collected in databases, inputted by users and computed by algorithms. SmartVideo, to me, is the natural evolution of video into the dynamic era. Instead of manually producing every single video (such as the web once was), a system is now capable of generating, tailoring, personalizing, contextualizing and optimizing video based on data.

Before we discuss the future, let’s talk about the present. Today, 90% of online video ads have simply been repurposed from television campaigns. As online video advertising technology continues to evolve, it is expected that more unique online creative will be produced. If we fast forward into the future, will we expect the below type of advertising?

In the advertising world there is a clear differentiation between brand advertising and performance advertising. While brand advertising is focused on increasing the brand’s awareness, the latter focuses on a direct response from the consumer. These programs are typically managed by different departments, pulling budgets from different places and are focused on achieving different goals.

I'm not referring to video player software, but the top participants driving online video innovation today. If you follow our blog regularly, are familiar with the online video industry, or are just a connected customer then you know that video is booming and will only continue to grow both in video consumption and video ad spending. Between brands, content sites and people, here is a round up of the 15 video players innovating the industry that you should be following today. 

“You gotta try this!” … It’s a phrase that draws you in. There’s excitement, satisfaction and wonder behind it. For brands it is the ultimate compliment – a word of mouth recommendation. A verbal Like button, it is a sign of success and the underlying component to NPS (net promoter score) aka “the ultimate customer satisfaction question.” 

I just returned from two days at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum where leading industry speakers shared thought-provoking ideas and powerful content. Simply put, this event helped solidify my view of the future where the customer is at the center of competitive strategy for the leaders in every industry. In fact, Harley Manning of Forrester shared a graph that compared 5-year total return of customer experience leaders (up 22%) to customer experience laggards (down 46%) to the S&P 500 (down 1%). Clearly, companies adopting a customer-centric strategy are already proving that we are in the “Age of the Customer.”