TechBytes with Sara Larsen, CMO at Brightcove

Tell us about your current role and the team/technology you handle at Brightcove.

As the CMO of Brightcove, I oversee Marketing Communications, Demand Generation, Field Marketing, Product Marketing, and Go-To-Market activities. This includes anything from branding, public relations, content development, and pipeline generation.

How have your marketing and sales teams regrouped to continue customer success benchmarks?

Our marketing and sales teams are aligned at every level, top to bottom. Our CRO and I believe sales and marketing are 100% jointly responsible for the bookings pipeline, and we communicate and set that example to our teams. We’ve established a joint pipeline war room to analyze results, develop new tactics, and execute together. Another area we work together is on customer story content, leveraging our deep customer relationships to highlight how video is being successfully used across many organizations. Underlying our teams is a joint trust, and a belief in positive intent to achieve results together.

What is PLAY TV and what are the video standards you have targeted for customers?

PLAY TV is an OTT streaming service that’s focused on all things video, from how retailers and marketers can leverage it, to how enterprises can use it to communicate with employees and, obviously, how content providers can use it to reach viewers. We have spent the past 60+ days working to deliver content that is relevant to our customers and people interested in video. We are using our very own Brightcove Beacon to deliver the experience to our viewers, which is the same technology many of our customers use to deliver content to their viewers.

Consumers today demand high-quality videos across their touchpoints- for example mobile, web, social, and TV. We are committed to ensuring our customers always deliver on these expectations-at large scale or in micro-moments.

What is Brightcove’s current product roadmap in Video services?

As the market-leading online video platform, we see several trends emerging, and are developing our capabilities to support these new needs. In the Enterprise, we’ve seen video usage grow 91% in the first quarter. This includes areas like demand generation and corporate communication, as well as business continuity. Live and event video content is now more important than ever, and we continue to scale our platform with best in class reliability. More and more content is going direct to consumer, and we continue to build out our products to help any content provider bring video into an app or screen easily, with extensive monetization abilities, and with best in class experiences.

How do you see the growing investments into AI ML and data analytics platforms transforming business teams, especially in the OTT/video marketing and events streaming platforms?

Clean and usable data is so important for teams to understand what is working and what isn’t, who is watching and where. Investing in analytics will enable companies to better serve their customers the content they crave and keep them engaged on the platform for longer.  We also publish video insights quarterly, in the Brightcove Video Index, to help the industry understand usage, patterns, and make decisions about video strategies.

Hear it from the Pro: What is the future of video-based Customer experience management platforms?

At Brightcove, we believe that video is the most powerful form of communication that has ever existed — and we see right now how video is profoundly changing our interactions.  In fact, we feel the current pandemic is video’s evolutionary event. It’s vital to keeping the economy, communities, and our lives moving forward and connected. As we move forward, video will be vital to customer experience. If you aren’t using video, then you are not delivering the best possible experience for your customers.

Most consumers found videos/ playback quality take up a lot of data bandwidth. How do you think new video benchmarks would align themselves with 5G adoption and IoT integration?

Consumers are looking forward to the increased bandwidth, reduced latency, and flat out speed that 5G will be able to deliver as it will translate to better live streaming, faster mobile broadband in general, a smoother AR experience and, maybe, finally help to fulfill the never-been-answered promise of virtual reality.

Video marketing has always been inspired by gaming experience. Could you share some recent examples of gaming experiences that Brightcove has delivered to customers?

Brightcove works with a wide range of customers around the world. Top of mind, Brightcove powers Dream 11, India’s largest sports fantasy league with 70 million registered users.

Tell us more about the video breaking news phenomenon sweeping across the B2B /enterprise consumption.

The pandemic is video’s evolutionary moment. We have seen an overall surge in video consumption over the past few months as news of the coronavirus evolved. In addition to watching news coverage to stay up to date on information, more companies shifted to a remote workforce, and students learned from home. As a whole, we all watched more video.

Consuming news via video is quick and easy as video is so ingrained into our everyday lives now. As news breaks, we automatically pick up our phones and search for answers, and a lot of time we get those answers through video. Take, for example, the recent SpaceX launch; we watched that live from around the world because video enabled us to do so. Additionally, we have seen how videos can start a movement, add to a movement, and give a voice to the voiceless.

Video is also an important tool to help us learn and understand the current happening around the world. Without video, we are less informed.

How can publishers better leverage video to boost their ad sales in 2020?

Publishers can better leverage video to boost ad sales in a few different ways. The first is to focus on direct-sold inventory and build relationships with the right brands. Secondly, require every article to be accompanied by a video as videos draw in more viewers. And lastly,  depending on the content, we are seeing customers double down on “read-out” ads as they garner really high CPMs and seem to have weathered the COVID storm.

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