The Role of AI Videos in Retail Marketing [Podcast & Recap]

Imagine you’re a retail brand, and you want to create a lot of videos about all of your various products to share to Instagram reels, or an agency who’s working with several retail brands and has a multiplier effect on video demand. Where do we start? And how do we scale up without losing quality?

That’s what Mike Allton, head of Strategic Partnerships at Agorapulse and host of The MarTech show, covered in its first episode. Guest Marc Gawith, head of Business Development at Pictory, is going to talk to us about the answers to those questions. Mark’s an industry thought leader who’s expertly guiding marketing professional towards achieving success in the fast paced world of AI video as the head of business development at a leading AI video company, Mark’s responsible for driving strategic partnerships and expanding the company’s presence in the market his dedication to driving innovation and excellence in the field of AI video creation has solidified his reputation as a dynamic and influential leader.

You can listen to whole episode below or continue reading to get a summary of highlights from the conversation.

Highlights of The MarTech Show, Ep. 1

We all have fantastic video cameras in our pockets these days, but that doesn’t mean an off-the-cuff shot as it’ll move the needle for our business. Sometimes, what we need to communicate with a video and on social media in particular is different.

Pictory, at its core is a, AI video creation tool. So that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, depending upon how familiar you are, or aren’t with AI.

Turn existing content into a short-form video with AI

Pictory’s flavor of AI is helping people, social media managers, community managers take the existing content that they have for the brand that they work for, the organization, etc., and turn that into short form video, quickly and easily with AI. So it’s not the idea of Midjourney or Dall-E or anything like that where it’s creating something new out of a prompt. This is basically taking a script, a piece of content copy that you’ve written and turning that into a video taking a blog post that maybe has performed historically well. And now turning that into a video, taking a webinar, podcast that, that maybe someone in your leadership team has done and and repurposing that and cutting it down into short snippets to fill up your content calendar.

The idea is helping people get past that blinking cursor effect where you’re kind of like, “What am I going to create today?”

You’re probably sitting on a gold mine of content. So how do you repurpose that content into videos that you can now use on, on social?

Faceless video for people who don’t want to be in front of the camera

Faceless video is a big, is a big component to what what Pictory sees from its users. Faceless video is basically just scenes with background voice. So whether it’s your own voice, maybe an AI voice over, we’ve recently integrated with Elevenlabs to give you those human-like sounding voices.

And then the text appears on screen, but there’s no face on screen. It’s just a series of images or shorter videos that are stitched together.

Faceless video is very popular for product release videos, explainer videos, listicle-type videos.

Challenges of Video Creation

When I think back to my trip to Social Media Marketing World last year, some of the conversations that I had were with a lot of social media marketers or community managers. The overwhelming majority of them mentioned,”I’m a single person! I work for a company that is has multiple social outlets, and I’m tasked with managing content across multiple channels!”

Think about how daunting that can be! You can have a tool like Agorapulse to help you organize all of that stuff, but it can really be daunting to to try to figure out what you’re going to share.

Editing your own video

If you don’t have the chops to edit video in the traditional video editors, it’s very difficult to do that and and often very daunting.

What Pictory does is give users them the ability to create video without without having to feel overwhelmed or scared about creating video and and not knowing how to do it with these traditional timeline-based editors, etc. So, it’s very user friendly. We have a UX that’s designed to be intuitive, and it just makes creating videos really easily. And then if you throw in our new brand kit experience that we just launched, being able to create multiple brands and manage multiple brands under one account is even easier to do that.

Storing videos

You can, as a retail manager, have a number of different product videos already created and store them in a content library like Agorapulse‘s and have those queued up and ready to go out whenever you want to share new social media posts with video.

How AI Video Differs From Traditional Video Creation

I’ll try to keep it surface level right now. There are a lot of different flavors of AI video creation. There’s this kind of futuristic, element, which is create a video of Marc playing golfon the moon, and you could do something like that with Midjourney or Dall-E. It creates more of a a cartoon-esque look and feel to that video.

That’s one element to it.

The element that we’re talking about with AI created video is if you think about like watching a traditional video, like even an ad, there are probably a lot of stock videos that are used as part of those Super Bowl ads.

Scripting

With the AI technologies that are now being used and the AI technology being used in Pictory, we make it really easy to take a script. So think about the script that you would write for a video. You’ve got you know what the actor or actress is going to say in each scene. And then you have the description of what the background is going to look like.

We basically take the idea of what that background is going to look like, and we take that text, and we match it to the stock image and stock visual library that we have, which is over 12 million stock videos and stock images. So just think about the time that it would take to find the right image for one scene! Let alone 12 scenes that you might have in a video!

Time-saving

So, the AI really takes that time that it would take (hours, sometimes depending upon the length of the video) and shortens it down to a few minutes or even a few seconds, depending upon the length of the video.

That’s where the AI magic comes in on the script to video.

I can create a short little highlight reel of that of that longer video and post that to LinkedIn or Facebook, wherever I ultimately end up sharing that. I can then say if you’re interested in watching the full episode or listening the full episode [then go here] and drive people back to the place that I want them to ultimately land on.  A social media manager or community manager can take something that’s long form, quickly turn it into a short form video, and then have a call-to-action to say if you like what you heard or like what you watched, here’s a link to the full episode and get people back to your website and get them back to your property, where they’re gonna be able to buy or subscribe or do whatever you want that consumer to do.

AI Video Creation Is Efficient

[A person] may not have worked with a professional videographer or agency that’s that’s used to building professional videos. So you may not know what goes into what we might think of as a really great-looking video. As amateurs, we wouldn’t know why.

One of the things that professionals are going to do if they come on-site to film you is they’re going to create a bunch of B roll.  They might record you saying script to the camera. They’re also going torecord you working on your laptop or or talking to a customer doing something like that. But with Pictory, apparently, a user could load up the script, and picture will help me locate stock video or create stock video.

That would fill in. So I could talk about Advocacy, but then all of a sudden, cut to a video clip that I didn’t have to film of, such as employees looking at their cell phone and sharing to social media. It would make it really feel like an immersive professional video while my script voice overlay continues the video.

What Kinds of Videos Are Performing Best on Social Media?

A surprising answer

One of the biggest may maybe a little bit of a surprise is people creating or using AI to create a video of the About Us page for their brand. So you think about the importance of humanizing your brand, people want to buy from people that they know like and trust.

Even if it’s just still images, it’s something that works really, really well. So what we’re seeing is we’re seeing people leverage Pictory, put in the URL for their About Us page, and then turn that About Us page into a video. So they’re able to pull in those images from that article as well as the text from that article.

And quickly and easily, they can turn that into a more social-worthy piece of content to say, “If you haven’t met our team before, here they are!” And now it becomes something that’s really, really easy to create. The social manager and the community manager can now say, “Hey, here’s our team! Hey, we just hire this new person!” and plug that in. And you can do that quickly and easily, whereas previously, if you wanted to create something like that, you probably would have hired an outside agency.

Every time you add a new person, you’re going to have to go back to them with a change request, and do all of that.

But with something like Pictory, you could simply plug in the URL for the About Uspage. We pull all of that information in, and we give you the ability to just simply interact with the text and pick what you want to have, as your script for the video. But also pull in all of the relevant images from that. So that’s one that we’ve seen that works really well.

A social media manager or community manager could easily do themselves without having to lean on an internal resource or somehow find budget for an external resource, which we all know that’s gonna be a challenge. And using AI eliminates the need to go back to the professional agency for updates. If we’re talking about our About Us page, we’re talking about new products that are rolling out. These are kinds of things that change all the time.

So, say we’ve invested a lot of money in video or have videos from a couple years ago that we now can’t use anymore because they’re dated for whatever reason. And if I’m using a tool like Pictory to generate that video today, it’s a piece of cake to come back in a month or six months and just recreate it. Say there’s been a major update to the about or there’s a new product or a change of the product, whatever the case might be, we can use it to recreate that video really easily.

And when you create that video, any of those assets that it pulls in, it’s going to save to your uploads folder. So those are all going to be there already for a future video that you create. Then it just becomes as simple as almost creating a new scene plugging in the new information if you wanted to do that.

The ability now to iterate on previous videos is so much easier than what it would what it would have been previously. It opens up a lot of opportunities for people to create videos even if they’re not a video creator or a video editor. It’s like what Guy Kawasaki called “the democratization of video.”

Tips for Using AI Video

Know what types of content resonate with your audience

And when I say what types of content, I mean, the messaging.

With Agorapulse, there is the ability to see and and get data, around what posts and what content is performing the best. So if you have a piece of written content that’s performing really, really well, why not turn that into a video? That then you can repurpose, and and share because you’ve already gotten traction out of it as a written piece.

Now you can turn it into something that’s more visual, and breathe new life into that existing content.

Use data to inform your content

One of the things that we believe here at Pictory is when we make decisions, use data over opinions to make those decisions.

So use that data to determine what content you should repurpose into a video. And now with a tool like Pictory, you can do it really quickly, with much more frequency, and not have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars for each individual you which for each video you create. It might be more like two or three dollars for each video you create.

Repost, repost, repost

You need to spend time regularly looking back at how your past posts have performed and reshare the posts that performed the best. For example, take a text post and turn it into a video post, then repost it exactly as you posted it a month ago six months later. It will perform great again. You do that over and over again because the you have new audience members coming in.

You’ve got people who did not see it before. We’re only reaching a fraction of our audiences with every single social post. Don’t be afraid to re share or repurpose old content. It’s a treasure trove of great stuff.

What Are the Ethical Concerns About Using AI for Video Creation?

When people think about AI right or wrong, they think about the ethical concerns. They think about large language models and all of the content that they upload to those being shared for anyone else to use to create something new in the future through prompts.

That’s going to continue to be top of mind for folks.

Privacy issues

When you think about video, too, if I upload a video that has someone from my company sharing something, it’s going to be public knowledge, but you don’t want other people access to that content. You want that to to live within your own instance of whatever tool you end up using.

Those are what we are thinking about as a company from an ethical perspective is. How do we continue to train our AI models to get really, really good at pulling out the right snippets, the right pieces of the the transcript if you’re doing a long form to short form video. And then we find and match the the images to the text, you know, etc.

But [Pictory] is not using a customer’s data to put back into our system and give other customers the ability to use that for their for their video project.

We’re just taking signals from the the finished product to to train our AI on what makes a good summarized video or what matches that tech to the image.

Those are things that as a video creator, as somebody that’s creating video for a brand, you should think about when you’re choosing a product or a tool. It’s not just about: What does this give me the ability to do? It’s: What is what does this mean for my company if I’m putting this information into this platform?

So even thinking about something like Midjourney, if you have a log in, as a company of Apple, all of a sudden, you’re playing around with a tool to say create something that might be a little bit or not be not in line with the Apple brand. Then, that now is going to be attributed to Apple as the company putting those prompts into this platform. Even if you’re just testing it out, creating things with it.

So just be a good steward with the tools that you’re using and making sure that the way that they are using your data is in line with your company’s policies.

Consent

So, we [Pictory] try to make sure that that is something that we lead with. We’re not introducing your content into our pool to say, “Hey, this customer created this video. Do you want to just use the same video?” There’s nothing like that that’s going on.

We’re just using certain flags in instances that say this was a successful video. We’re only using the elements that help us train the AI to help you better find pieces within your own video or within your own text to match the images. Just make sure that you understand what that company is doing with your data when you, when you leverage that tool.

A lot of people recommend when you’re using a tool like ChatGPT or one of the other similar large language models, do not ever input sensitive proprietary company information. Those kinds of tools don’t know any better, and they will save that information and potentially regurgitate it to somebody else. We consumers must be careful.

We have to be ethical about how we’re using the tools. We have to take some ownership of that personally. But let’s talk about Picture in the rest of this year.

Where Is AI Heading?

AI video is going to continue to evolve in a way that keeps people engaged on. There are a lot of new bright shiny things that are going on. But ultimately, I think the thing that’s going to win out is the companies that can help people start with something and turn that into a video.

It’ll be continuously a kind of race to see who adds new features and new functionality.