AI, Engagement Strategies, and Video Content: What’s in Store?

By Chantal Reed, Fractional CMO, Launch and Growth Marketing Advisor: Tech Innovation, SaaS and CX

We have all most likely increased our use of video during and since the pandemic. (I hear a big sigh of agreement from those of you missing a bit of real person conversation.) And many point to COVID as the catalyst that led marketers and salespeople to adopt Unified Communications strategies, which were previously unthinkable.

For 20 years, we were pushing water uphill…

Although Cisco in the noughties was still near to a $1B business even before it acquired Webex, we knew the opportunity was absolutely mind-blowing, if only we could get over the big hurdle of ‘change’. Literally overnight, the collaboration and UC messaging around reducing carbon footprint, costs, capex, increasing collaboration across regions and driving flexible working and all its benefits finally landed!

Unified Communications adoption was no longer a ‘might think about it’ but a ‘must have’. Businesses needed to upgrade their infrastructure and implement UC quickly.

Zoom did exactly that as it Zzzooooooomed into our homes (sorry!) and grew. Microsoft Teams – embedding the old great innovation of Skype – has become pretty established as a ‘go to’, and Cisco Webex, with its far richer functionality than many, is also available!

But also benefiting from this tipping point of realisation were Video Event organisations providing webinars and other live and canned videos. These were steeped in data helping B2B marketers measure engagement more than they ever could at a face-to-face event. Now, this is the perfect platform for AI to really flex its muscles. Below, I dive mainly into its functionality, but there will be huge steps in event measurement coming with this.

Seriously we have all been there.

Question: How successful was the event and should we do it again? What was the ROI, what was the engagement, what real leads came out of this? Revenue?

Well, our little friend AI and companies like Kaltura, for example, are waving the flag for video customer engagement. I recently attended a face-to-face event by Kaltura, strange for a company dealing in Video Events one may say, but they ultimately see the value of the hybrid situation and in small groups of interested clients and prospects wanting to network with each other and discover more… I thought it was an excellent move.

AI is a game changer for customer experience in video. It’s not just about text anymore…

CEO and Co-Founder Ron Yekutiel explained in his closing comments that owning the data as a company is critical when looking at implementing the best of AI. It helps to train the elements of the data – indexing, search, summarisation and chapterisation, for example, all lead to increased speed to resolution. For us marketers, automated teaser videos that can be quickly collated to a meaningful narrative will improve efficiency and reduce discovery time; this is being developed for market in the next 12 months!

Literally a minute after we heard the main speakers at Kaltura’s event, we had a summarised video montage appear on the screens, narrating what we had just seen. This would be extraordinary and powerful for, say an AGM if that were for broadcast in a B2B environment for internal and external communications.

According to Yekutiel, in the next 12- 24 months, AI will drive better video analysis, detection and moderation – not just the text but the actual video itself – and allow content moderation to be literally automated.

Media companies will have no excuse for Terror or Inappropriate content airing… For years, Meta, Twitter, and TikTok have had a duty of care to protect our children. At MSN, in the early 2000s, we had to create policies but had little technical power to enforce and ensure compliance by what is an open platform. Now, AI will give us that control as it matures in this particular use case.

But the real nirvana and disrupter according to Yekutiel is the changes AI will cause in video enhancement and production. Improvements, restoration, video summarisation, captioning, and full-on production capabilities so that distribution companies will be able to produce and distribute at the flick of a switch.

It gets better!

ADD personalisation and then rich video content that is relevant to a person on the fly and content serving becomes their own personal journey – they control it and pull content. Should we actually be needing websites in the future? What B2B marketing strategies will we be able to drive?

Search indeed becomes a Video First Engine and Digital First platform, when the meta data is available and AI is let loose.

So, my B2B marketer friends, I find myself back in 2002, sitting at my desk at MSN Microsoft on the shares launch day of Google Search and thinking about how we can make MSN Search (before it was Bing) relevant for our B2B customers as a monetisation platform. For you in 2023, maybe it is how can you use this tipping point in Video Technology to create true customer engagement, serving relevant content in a timely, personal, and interestingly consumable manner – whether that be internal customers in a training sense or a brand and product marketing execution.

Use this technology disruption to be creative with your B2B marketing strategies and bring your B2B customer content they really do want to listen to, watch and learn from.

As for the measurement of customer engagement? My brain is racing with the possibilities that AI could bring in that area… for another time but love to hear your thoughts!

So as Video revolutionised our Workspace, and before that, Google revolutionised Text Search, AI will revolutionise Video Search and indeed create richer experiences for consumers and for B2B brands needing to drive engagement. I would definitely be researching how you can bring AI Video into your 2024 planning.