Cloudinary Video Survey: Brands Struggle to Deliver Video-rich Experiences at Scale

Brands will struggle to scale their video usage and harness critical customer engagement opportunities if they can’t overcome post-production challenges according to the first Cloudinary Global Video Survey of web developers, marketers and other business leaders across 15 countries. The independent survey, commissioned by Cloudinary, found that while brands are increasingly reliant on video to build trust and confidence (78%) with their audiences, boost market awareness (65%), and drive purchases (54%) many struggle to deliver video at the scale today’s audiences demand. Surprisingly, brands face more challenges with creating video variants for different channels and devices (58%) than with creating original videos in the first place (46%). Learn more in today’s blog and survey infographic.

Not so surprisingly, ease matters. 49% of respondents who reported being able to publish videos in “less than an hour” also said they were “completely likely” to expand their use of video in the future. This fell to just 24% for brands whose videos took days to publish.

The survey also found that more than two-thirds (69%) host user-generated content (UGC) in order to raise audience engagement (79%), provide authentic user experiences (63%), and improve SEO (44%).

Streamlining post-production processes

The video post-production process is extensive and involves several stages. Adding to this complexity, the process involves two very different teams with distinct skills and mindsets: creative and development. As a result, “managing requests and feedback” was cited by creatives as the top challenge (46%) when working with development teams to get videos online. This was followed by “lack of knowledge of technical best practices” (33%) and “lack of visibility into developer timelines” (31%) indicating that more work still needs to be done to improve collaboration between these teams.

These challenges exist regardless of whether video is produced internally or supplied by creative partners. According to the survey, the top three challenges when receiving video assets from creative partners are “multiple file formats to support” (45%), “lack of web/mobile optimized files” (41%), and “late delivery of assets” (38%).

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As brands mature online, so must their tools

Despite the fact that brands employ video specialists (34% have 1-5 on staff), challenges still abound. One possible explanation is brands’ heavy reliance on the generalist video management tools, such as YouTube (78%) and Vimeo (41%), that offer wide reach but little brand control. As brands refine and strengthen their video strategies, more specialized tools are needed to handle tasks like optimizing format and quality for different platforms, customizing video to align with brand guidelines, and providing greater content moderation and security controls.

Brands will continue to expand their use of video

According to the survey a full 81% of respondents are “completely likely” (35%) or “very likely” (46%) to expand their use of video across their websites and mobile apps in the future. Without intelligent automation, it can take several hours, even days, for developers to prepare a single video for use across a brand’s digital channels. That’s why it’s critical for brands to adopt technologies designed to alleviate these complex manual workflows, enabling teams to manage, customize, optimize, and deliver video to any channel or device at scale and within minutes.

According to Genevieve Haldeman, VP Corporate Marketing, Cloudinary, “We’ve seen firsthand through our work with leading brands of all sizes, there are equal opportunities to gain maximum ‘return on video.’ Thanks to tools that harness the power of AI, brands can automate many of the repetitive and tedious tasks like tagging, editing, cropping and optimizing for all channels and devices – tasks that once slowed them down. This automation also frees up creative and development teams to focus on critical tasks like design, branding, security, and high-level content moderation.”

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