Personalized Videos For Marketing Campaigns
frontend
video player
- Our client was a Polish startup making personalized videos for sales & marketing, UX, lead generation, or even chatbot solutions.
- When we began, the client already had the product and business contracts but needed a modern, more systemized technology to scale and acquire new markets.
- Our solution covered two aspects: building an Adobe AfterEffects plugin to support the client's workflow and developing a video player component to support the client's video stream model
- We delivered the solution in time and enabled a significant switch in the client's business model, from a service-oriented to more of a product-based
Video is the most engaging form of digital marketing, with around a 50% engagement rate for a video of up to 5 minutes.
Surveys results speak in unison also when it comes to personalization claiming that 80-90% of users are much more likely to purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience, be it offers, recommendations, or simply using their name in the communication.
Our client took that data one step further and mixed video and recommendations to create a "super-engagement" effect on their campaigns.
Customer experience personalization software and services worldwide are predicted to reach USD 8.28bn in 2020-2026.
Prologue
In their early days, our client was a service-only company, working on personalized video campaigns for various businesses. As their product performed well, they started acquiring big contracts. One of these contracts was heavily time-constrained.
Our client had around three months to lift their solution from a working MVP to a scalable, well-thought piece of software.
The rework included their core systems at the time:
- an Adobe After Effects plugin that allowed preparing customizable videos using a proprietary dynamically enriched videos workflow called a "scenario";
- a JS video player component that supports the display of "scenarios" on websites, emails, or social media.
As the video domain was new for us, we established a tight feedback loop with the client and began working on modern software to support the business.
It's all in the script
The project's biggest challenge was its unconventionality. For both systems, there were no readymade solutions. We had to map their dependencies and define the architecture based solely on a client's specification, Adobe's documentation, and our in-depth research. We even did some reverse-engineering, looking for answers directly in the AE application code.
The solution had to be ready as soon as possible, and the quality just had to be high, as the client's goal was to start offering their product to other companies and external marketing agencies.
The chain goes on, as more campaigns meant more customers and much more videos to prepare and render. Rendering a single HD video may not require much computational power, but doing so for every person targeted in a country-wide bank campaign makes the cost skyrocket.
That's why we put a lot of focus on the video player part. We wanted it to be fully aligned with the "scenario" stream. This way, we could augment videos in real-time, allowing a practically infinite number of personalizations without the need to pre-render them, thus significantly reducing potential costs.
Epilogue
We delivered both systems on time and later developed some functionalities further. The client has grown since then. Our plugin and player are the baselines for their up-and-coming advanced solutions covering AI usage in video personalization, responsive personalization, or nearly unlimited scale.