TechBytes with Hila Shitrit Nissim, VP Communications, Slidely

Hila Shitrit Nissim
VP Communications, Slidely

Video is one of the fastest growing modes of digital advertising that also has the highest rates of engagement. To understand the intricacies of visual content and make sense of the direction that this industry is moving in, we spoke to Hila Shitrit Nissim, VP Communications, Slidely

Tell us about your role at Slidely and the team and technology that you handle.

I joined Slidely approximately a year ago to lead marketing and communications.

As part of my role, I am focused on brand strengthening, public relations and business development activities. I work with a very talented marketing team of 6, who are leading the company’s user acquisition efforts, content marketing and social media, email automation,  and business intelligence.

Slidely is a visual content platform and the provider of Promo, a leading creative video platform for businesses and agencies, that was launched just 2 years ago. Promo makes professional videos accessible by providing access to over 12.5 million premium video clips, curated licensed music, a user-friendly editor and ready-made video projects.

As VP of Marketing & Communications, what part you play in product development and product launches?

At Slidely, the marketing and the product teams work very closely together. The marketing team provides constant customer feedback and requests that influence our product roadmap and feature priorities. We plan and execute product launches together, from email announcements, in-app messaging, online campaigns and video ads, as well as loads of A/B testing within the product or in our ads.

How do you work with AI/ML technologies at Slidely?

We see that AI is playing a growing role in marketing technologies across the board and even more so in the video marketing space. For us, this enables better customization of the services we provide to our users, making our video creatives significantly more performance-optimized and leveraging the power of our collective data to benefit our customers.

With the power of AI and machine learning, video ads will not only be more personalized, they also will be automatically created and better optimized for the business’ goals and targets.

Which topics in technology do you often discuss with your team at Slidely?

We like to keep ourselves up to date when it comes to advanced marketing technologies that can improve our business efforts and our customers’ lives. We are constantly researching the newest developments in the world of marketing and social media as well as BI and reporting tools. This is not only to ensure we remain leaders in the video creation industry but also in order to provide meaningful education and assistance for all of our users, marketing their own businesses. We have built our teams in such a way that ensures we keep our finger on the pulse in regards to new targeting tactics, conversion optimization, the performance of our service, QA tools, attribution and tracking tools and more. But our passion doesn’t stop there. We are constantly exploring advancements in gamification, VR and AR, within our Promo Innovation Lab.

Which events and conferences you closely follow to stay on top of your product and marketing game?

We follow all major marketing, advertising and social media events, mainly in the US.

In 2017 we presented at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego and had a wonderful experience. We also attended the Traffic & Conversions Conference by Digital Marketer.

As a Facebook Marketing Partner, we join many of the Facebook Industry Events, including F8. In addition, we follow Advertising Week and INBOUND, which are great marketing resources and present good networking opportunities.

How do you see trends in Advanced Video Analytics further influencing the adoption of automation technologies for marketing and sales?

With Video becoming the most effective and dominant content form online, it is clear that businesses will increase the demand for diverse video types from varied sources.

Video analytics serve as a great growth driver because it shows what types, creatives, lengths and formats of videos are delivering the highest ROI for brands and advertisers. This improves the performance of video marketing and therefore increases the demand for video marketing services.

What are your predictions on the future of visual content platforms?

It is quite clear that social media usage will continue to grow. According to Hootsuite research, 1 million new people joined social networks every single day in 2017, and this growth is predicted to continue. A lot has changed since the early days of social media, and it is clear now that in order to attract the attention of people you must use visual content, and even better videos. Visual content platforms will be built in an increasing pace due to the high and growing demand by consumers and businesses.

To quote Mark Zuckerberg, “Over the next few years, the much bigger driver of the business and determinant of how we do (business) is going to be video, not Messenger.”

The Promo service is based on the assumption that smart business owners will create videos at a growing pace, and will very soon produce at least one video per week in order to stand out online and engage with their users. The only way to scale content and video creation is by using a self-service platform like Promo that offers an easy to use and affordable solution for video creation.

What are the core tenets of your video creation technology? How do you see programmatic technologies playing a larger role in video creations and targeting?

Our video creation technology is built to combine the power of our award winning video editors and the data received from our customers to power an AI based creation engine that can produce unique and engaging video content at scale.
Video will take a larger part of what programmatic services will offer and to do that, they will need video creation solution that can serve the huge demand for videos in a given vertical, across so many different verticals. Such a platform should also be able to support creative A/B testing and optimization at a fast pace. I believe Promo is one of a very few platforms that are built for such a scale.

Tell us more about your B2B partnerships how does it make your company deliver better results to the customers?

As proud Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partners, we work closely with the Facebook Product and Sales teams in order to leverage this prestigious badge for mutual business growth. Additional close partnerships include Wistia and Hubspot, mainly for product integrations but also for content and marketing cooperation.

We also enjoy building partnerships with new innovative SaaS companies such as needls, content influencers including Joel Comm and Blitzmetrics and more in order to offer complimentary business solutions to our core user base.

Thanks for chatting with us, Hila.

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