Podcast: What's The Future of Video Marketing

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The next wave of video marketing: next-generation video and viewer experience

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda chats with a pioneer in interactive video Nick Morgan, Co-Founder & Joint CEO of Vudoo.

Join us while we discuss the second wave in video marketing: next-generation video and viewer experience. Nick will tell us about his personal path into video and provide unique insights about the challenges and tools to develop a strategy.

This episode’s guest:

 

Conversation segments on this episode:

• [1:21] Nick Morgan's career and the beginnings of Vudoo

• [4:19] The new challenges of video marketing across multiple verticals and organisations

• [9:00] The difference between passive and active experiences in video

• [13:48] Collection and interaction with data from viewer experiences

• [14:54] Metrics for comparison of interactions

• [16:38] The foundations for a second-generation video strategy

• [19:02] The evolution of the video player

• [20:14] Different structures for a video team

• [23:04] Next steps

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• About interactive video
• Vudoo’s integration with Salesforce
• Follow Pat MacFie on Twitter

About the Growth Colony Podcast:

On this podcast you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Hosted by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony.

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Episode Full Transcript:

[0:36] Shahin Hoda   Hello again and thank you for jumping on another episode of Growth Colony podcast. My name is Shahin from xGrowth and today I'm talking to Nick Morgan, the co-founder of Vudoo, a very special startup right here in Melbourne, pioneering interactive videos and taking videos to another level. 

Today we're gonna talk about what is the next wave of video marketing and what is coming that we should be definitely aware of. So, on that note, let's jump in and start the conversation. Thanks for joining us, Nick.

[1:16] Nick Morgan   Thanks, mate. Appreciate it. Love being here and thanks for, yeah. pioneering. I like that one.

[1:21] Shahin Hoda   No, it's absolute pleasure. No, I go for it. It's the truth. But look, first of all, Nick, would love to get an introduction from yourself about yourself and about Vudoo. In case some people haven't heard of.

[1:39] Nick Morgan   Sure. I'm about a 15 20 year digital career. 

Initially start being kind of e-commerce, early, heady days of e-commerce where we were building very, very small websites, which go into very large websites, and then kind of focus my  attention on conversion rate optimization and UX and that kind of space and then grow into more of a kind of an entrepreneurial role with it with a few different businesses and then more moving into a product guy.

So I'm very much obviously very much a product person now and have been for a number of years, but that's really kind of my growth path. Vudoo is what you would refer to as an interactive video platform. It's a SaaS product. And we started in 2016. And it's now grown across the UK in Australia, Sydney, and Melbourne and Bristol. 

And essentially, it's a product that allows you to take existing content or plan for new video content and turn that video content into an interactive experience or interactive viewing experience or view or view experience which is the new terms kind of popping up VX. 

The reason why we started this business in the first place was we myself my co-founder is boarding who's Product guy come from data capture integrated into Salesforce and other kind of, you know, pioneering products before us. So he thought there's a great opportunity and brought to me that was existing kind of product in the market that already had, like a place being used by a number of companies, but it was actually a really poor experience. 

We use it ourselves. We had used it with some of our customers at the time. And we saw that there was an opportunity to develop a product there was actually a lot better. So really kind of living the term I guess, aiming to be best in the market rather than being first in the market. So we really kind of took hold of that and ran with it. 

And we started developing the product once we'd raised our initial seed funding, early 2017. And since then we've built the product out. We've really put a lot of time engineering all the time into it, we've taken it to market to really get a sense of how it should work and how it could work and to make it better from learning from customers. 

We've built our partnerships and now we're getting ready to scale really, outside of Australia's borders, we've, we've stepped into the UK, but the aim is to really move to the US.

[4:19] Shahin Hoda   Gotcha. That's amazing. That's an amazing story, especially in a short period of time of four years. Now, I also love to explore a little bit about the video marketing space, right, it's a very hot space. And there's you know, there's a lot of talk in there and, you know, not even some of the newer and more modern systems that you're talking about. 

But you know, people are still very hesitant in terms of using video and incorporated in their marketing stack. Can you give us a quick snapshot of you know, what has happened in the video marketing space in the past few years? Like how development has taken shape.

[5:02] Nick Morgan  Sure. Yeah, it's a fascinating subject, obviously. We look, it wasn't originally a video guy per se, is very much a digital, you know, a practitioner for digital professional. 

When we did our research, right start to look at the market, we were just, we were just blown away by the size, and how massive the market is in regards to the use of video across very different verticals as well, multiple verticals. 

And we really thought the opportunity for us was going to be in marketing it's still very much is but we're now our product is used across a number of different other sectors such as learning development, corporate comms as well, but the video marketing space itself is really going through a big change. 

It's really happening in other countries. We're seeing a lot of it in the US we're seeing a lot of in the UK, starting seen more in Asia, and Australia is getting to that it's slower, but getting So what we're seeing is videos ever since really YouTube came on came on board, you know, 15 16, 17 years ago, and has grown to the behemoth that it is, it's really videos taking on the kind of life of its own. 

I say over the last four to five years, we've seen videos start to trickle down from say, being a leading-edge kind of marketing tool mechanic, regardless of how, how powerful the tool is, and the same across the market. Obviously, there's kind of there's like gods and those people that get to us later than others. 

We've now seen that that kind of trickled down throughout the like levels. So we've gone right through different verticals, right through different sectors right through across different organisations, governments, and video is now becoming a standard tool across many, many different sectors. And it's almost which is fantastic, but it's also becoming a challenge, right? 

Because what it's doing is it's, it's saying if you've got competitors and you've had peers that you're all lifting the bar to a certain standard when you're all engaging in really well-produced video content. And you can get it done now, very, very cheaply, and very, very swiftly with a lot of different tools and different providers online. 

Here in the UK and US, you're saying that the bar has been raised, and it's all being raised the same, same height, right? So what we're starting to see now is where companies go from there, if we're all creating amazing content, and one it's being measured on standard metrics, the same ones such as average view time, total, total views caught our views, they start to become slightly cake because we're all measuring on very basic metrics very high. 

Where do companies go from there? If we're all on the same page, we're all in same that same bar, where do we go? Because video is, you know, you can I don't need to tell you how powerful video is from a from a mechanic perspective is you There is a range of information online about that. 

But where do we go? And part of the kind of strategy for Vudoo is we saw where so we saw where the large brands such as big global brands such as you know, Netflix and Instagram that time now TikTok, we saw what they were achieving at a really top in kind of marketing funnel perspective. 

They're delivering a video experience, which is very leading edge, but it's on a mass scale. So you have a mass consumer base being customised or becoming accustomed to a video experience being set the global level, but that's not what happens on say, a government website or a brand's website or a leading, you know, a drink or you know, drinks or manufacturing or sporting, you're they're still using video, which you know, is shot produced, just passively plays on a device. So we saw there's a big kind of gap In the middle.

[9:00] Shahin Hoda   Right, and how would you maybe before we go into that, how would you define these two differences? Right? These, the delta between these two between looking at what is happening in TikTok and Netflix and what are you seeing them the government page or, you know, a standard website? When you say there is a, there's a big gap between these two, how do you define that? What is that gap, exactly?

[9:29] Nick Morgan   Passive versus active.

[9:31] Shahin Hoda   Right. What do you mean by that? 

[9:32] Nick Morgan   Simple as that so if you have a, if you have a video, quite common across an owned asset, just your website now, it's, it's the experience is really down to play, stop, pause, scrub forward, watch the watch that video, and hopefully you'll hopefully your audience will finish it or maybe, I think, you know, maybe try and hit an average retirement 18 20% and then navigate away there's a lead. 

If you think about all the effort, time cost that's gone into producing that video content, you're only getting an average view time of 20%. What's happening the rest of the 80%? That lost costs, all that effort. So it's a very passive because it's a very passive experience. You're just consuming the content, and it's not always can be been consumed completely. I'll just say what do we mean by active?

[10:23] Shahin Hoda   Oh, okay. That's, that's the passive alternative. And it sounds like this is the crux of it. This is the big thing that we're going to talk about. What do you mean by active?

[10:32] Nick Morgan   Active is when you engage the user to contextually interact with the video content inside the video frame, okay. So you are placing interactions with authentic interactions which relate to the narrative of the video and allow the viewer to engage further in further content that's not being displayed or being presented inside the video content. 

So for example, you might have an auto manufacturer. And they have this is actually a live problem they have, you have the auto manufacturer, and they have a brief on new product launch, they write the brief, they provide it to their, to their production company, the production company comes back and says, great brief guys love it. This is going to be a 10-minute video, if we have to get all of your points of interest in all the key selling points of this vehicle. That's going to be a 10-minute video. 

But with an interactive video, they can say okay, what are the top five things we know they're going to sell this product, but we still need to have everything else in there. So they can craft the deal. Bring the video down to say a minute, and then the rest of the content can be presented as interactions and overlays and engaging content on top of inside the video as you're viewing.

[11:50] Shahin Hoda   Yeah, so if somebody's interested in that feature in that, you know that rim the car or that interior or that what is the leather, show me a little revise that they could just go on a personalised journey, correct. It's not necessary if somebody is not interested don't necessarily have to sit down and get bored and watch correctly.

[12:10] Nick Morgan   And you might go anything deeper by saying, okay, we're going to have this model launch is going to be five variations of the model. You know, you've got the model for you know, the mom, you got the model for somebody, you know, another demographic gonna model from another demographic, why not allow them to go on a personalised, choose your own adventure style video and choose what content they'd like to experience? 

[12:31] Shahin Hoda   Gotcha. That's right. That's, that's what you mean by active.

[12:35] Nick Morgan   That's what's being active. Now. We know from research that we've done, and a lot of researching around learning and development and interactivity that you actually drive a deeper cognitive response when you present interactions inside the video player. 

We know through our own research, we have a research panel that we work with in the US that we can lift all standard metrics when we actually drive someone to engage with that and in interact with video content. 

[13:01] Shahin Hoda   So interesting. 

[13:02] Nick Morgan   You can lift and create a heightened experience. But wait there's more steak knives. The nuts and bolts in the best part of this is what you're actually influencing viewer behaviour. And whilst you're influencing viewer behaviour, you're collecting Voodoo collects new metrics. So but we collect and present behavioural insights. 

So all of that clicking around all those journeys, all those choices, decisions that happen inside, we then present those back as analytics, as behavioural analytics to get a sense of what has this viewer experiencing, and preferring and liking and engaging with inside that video at that time.

[13:48] Shahin Hoda   Right and that gate data I'm guessing it would get populated for example, Salesforce, and when somebody's looking at at a potential customer, they could see the exact journey they could see what they just like you said, what they prefer, and they'll know a lot more about them than, hey, this person has just watched this video,

[14:07] Nick Morgan   You got 100,000 people to watch a video. And you have, all you're measuring them is on their total view, that quarter view, the average view time, you don't know anything else about them. But there is that content that they've watched is so rich in potential data points of interest, we're kind of pulling the clock back from that all of that data that can be interacted with and measured.

[14:30] Shahin Hoda   Right?

[14:31] Nick Morgan   So it seems, in a sense, is very simple.

But it's very, it has a it's kind of like an iceberg.

And a lot of the times we present it and they say is it and it's like let's let me just show you a little bit more. We kind of you know, show them under the hood and they get and then customers prospective customers, a lot of government organisations that we're working with, really get it. Okay. There's a lot more of these. Yeah,

[14:54] Shahin Hoda   I see. So it's very interesting. So you're introducing new, new analytics for video. Can we go through that again? Like what? What are so there are some of the old old metrics that that people measure? What are some of the more advanced metrics that you're seeing that you are measuring with your videos?

[15:15] Nick Morgan   So we can measure things like we can give you a physical interaction, right? So we can tell you how engaged they are in the entire video view. We can give you per interaction, right? We compare interactions, we can build questions in there to kind of drive an NPS score when we integrate into so for example, with our integration to Salesforce, we can then personalise all the interactions, so when and then we can personalise that experience. 

And then we can pull all that all those interaction data, and then push that back up into say, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and journey builder. And so for example, they could look at they could potentially they could ask a question around you lock this product, for example, yes, no, based on those responses, they could then set formula or set a journey to trigger another journey hit that customer inside three days time. 

So it's almost kind of a sandbox in regards the analytics, how far you take it, the value that a lot of our customers get around comparisons. So if they've got a lot of content in there or product content, they can compare the content interactions and then decide what content they should be tailoring and creating that's more appropriate to the audience. 

So yeah, it's a long list the long list of stuff. Yeah

[16:38] Shahin Hoda   I love it. So you know the next wave of video marketing is obviously you call it viewer experience or view experience. Viewer experience VX

[16:49] Nick Morgan   Yeah, second-generation video. Got a little buzz term flooding around you know the video. We asked you more guys around the globe.

[16:59] Shahin Hoda   We mark it as a low buzzword. Yeah, that's for sure. So, so VX is, is around the corner or at least it's pretty much here. And it's taken over. Now look, if a business is looking at incorporating, like, they're like, you know, what we understand the video is important, right?

And we want to kind of best prepare to take full advantage of video marketing and the changes that are coming in that space. What is your advice to those businesses? How can they go about and kind of set the foundations right?

[17:34] Nick Morgan   I think it's that's a good question. We do get asked that a lot. Well, my answer to that is a lot of companies now will have obviously a content plan as part of a marketing plan. 

And we asked a question of a lot of companies saying what's your video plan? What's your video strategy? And a lot of the time responses are we do video? 

Yeah, we've got a YouTube channel. Oh, we've got some product videos there. We this part of our content plan. That's the first place, that's where you start. That's where you actually have to pull out a video strategy and have it as a standalone approach. 

If you look at all of your marketing, and you break down the highest performing mechanics of your marketing activity, the video will be at the top there, no doubt, there needs to be a focus on that. So break it out on packet and look at what you could be doing. specifically around video and don't use videos. 

As you know, don't append it to whatever you're doing use it as a potentially as one of your primary focuses and build an activity around that. Might Yeah, my answer there is to break it away from just being potty content plan and have as a separate strategy itself. That's a great place to start. 

[18:45] Shahin Hoda   Right. So where you see a lot is that people just look at the video as another piece of content, where you know, there's a lot more complexity to video compared to producing a blog post right where you grab a writer who would take a photo and they'll like your ego, it's a blog post 

[19:02] Nick Morgan   That's it. That's a nice thing. With the second generation video is going to become more and more complex, you're going to see an evolution of the video player. You know, video players have been in this same kind of, when I say video play, you know, you've got your video frame and you play stop scrubbing pause, that's kind of been the same looking piece of tool toolkit for quite some time, we're starting to see an evolution of that. 

So you'll start to see those being those players being refined and a lot more tools being available to you and those players such as what you can provide, then it's a great way to look at it for our brands. 

When they say oh, well you know, we when I when we what we advise them to break out their videos separate strategy is to look at look potentially if you're a beta, you know, a beta city or consumer brand.

Look at what your team is doing at those top end funnels, such as you TikTok and Instagram and think about the experience that's being provided in those channels, there's no reason that you could be providing those similar experience or leveraging the experience your customers are already receiving from you in those channels directly on your own assets as well.

[20:14] Shahin Hoda   Gotcha. And, Nick, what, what kind of team structure do you see for companies who are doing video? Well, right? What kind of team structure do you see that their video team has? That you're like, you know what this is, this is a decent video team, and they have all the right at least basic pieces of what they need in a team together to make it make video work.

[20:42] Nick Morgan   Yeah, it looks it varies. Obviously, if you're working with a big government, government department, we work with the CTO and we've worked through the eight with the ATF through this whole period, which has been great, amazing experience to be able to provide our product have at their disposal during this whole period, but they've got a massive team here bigger than you would ever expect. 

If you're looking at say a general kind of, you know, general kind of marketing team within a consumer brand, you're probably starting to look at what we refer to as a hired gun. So you know, a video person that can shoot, edit, some After Effects, and do the whole production as a one as one person they're becoming because the tools available are very available to everybody. 

And the quality of video that you can shoot from even a mobile device now is is isn't incredible. There is an opportunity to bring in a dedicated video person, you could start with one person that can do everything you need, and then you kind of grow it out from there. 

You might want to bring in a second person and bring the third video person then you might bring in a producer, digital producer. What I see is there's a lot of kind of cross skills from existing team members, designers and producers that have been working the digital industry can actually work across video As well as apply, say, an agile, agile process to a video production as well works very well. 

So if you actually bring in a digital producer who may or may not have been working on a lot of videos, but as I mean working in an agile fashion, they can work across video manage video teams and individuals as well, that works very, very well. 

So there's a, there's no need to think we have to go to the market and hire a whole video production company, you can produce really great content on very minimal tools these days. And there's a lot of cross skills that are that can be applied.

[22:34] Shahin Hoda   Gotcha. So yeah, so you bring that unicorn video shooter editor. Yeah, you could get things off the ground and yeah.

[22:43] Nick Morgan   We know and we know lots of them, you know what I mean? We know a lot of people know, you know, network or those kinds of, we call them high guns that can do it all. And we're offering them we're offering we're finding companies now hiring those individuals that can do you know, you know, shooting editing Fix. And so it's so agile now. 

[23:04] Shahin Hoda   No, I love it. I love it

Now, Nick, is there anything else? You know, we've this has been an awesome conversation. But is there anything else that you think the lesson listeners would benefit or that I missed in our conversation? Do you think there's value in bringing up here?

[23:21] Nick Morgan   No, I think I think you've I think we've covered it all. It's really, um, what I would suggest is to look out there and do some decent reading around next-generation video and viewer experience. There's a lot starting to bubble up. 

There's a great guy out of New Zealand Pat MacFie to be the global director of content for Xero, an incredible video guy. Big, big, big believer in next generation video where it's going, look him up. He's a really great resource, a lot of learnings from him, but do some research and you'll be surprised at what's starting to come to fruition or and be available to companies as well, because we were building out and, and, and really testing learning our product in Australia ready to grow it outside of Australia. But there's so much happening in the US in the UK, which is really exciting. It's Yeah. In the video in the V. V x space. Yeah, get in there has a look around.

[24:24] Shahin Hoda   Automatic unwinds. And now if someone wants to get in touch with you or know more about Voodoo, what's the best way that they can do that?

[24:32] Nick Morgan   You can hit to our site Vudoo, the Vudoo.com or can hit me up. Nick.Morgan@vudoo.com. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm everywhere, you find me.

[24:45] Shahin Hoda   That's amazing. That's amazing, Nick, it's been an absolute pleasure having you. 

[24:49] Nick Morgan   Pleasure. Thank you. 

[24:50] Shahin Hoda   Thank you very much.

[24:54] Nick Morgan   Thanks, mate.

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