MarTech Interview with Gary Lipkowitz, CEO at Vyond

Gary Lipkowitz, CEO at Vyond uncovers more on what it takes to drive better video experiences for sales and marketing teams:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Gary, take us through your journey and what it’s been like as CEO at Vyond leading the team the last few years…

Thank you, great to be talking to you!

I joined Vyond 12 years ago and it’s exactly where I’m meant to be. We focus on helping companies communicate better with video and delivering positive business outcomes. When I started my career making training videos for big companies like Andersen Consulting and Dell, I got to make videos that also had a real bottom line impact. For example, experiments on assembly line processes to prove and measure efficiency improvements. Those experiences forged me as a video evangelist and the focus on positive outcomes of video to an organization. From there, I worked in the film and entertainment industry before joining my first start up which was a travel search engine company. I stayed there for four years before joining Vyond and loved every minute.

Leading the team here has been exciting, challenging, rewarding – all of it. Major milestones we’ve hit over the last few years have been surpassing 20 million users, moving into great new office space, taking growth funding from our great partners at PeakSpan. And the pandemic was a thing and a half! We’re back to a hybrid work schedule and it’s been so great seeing people in person again. For me at least, it’s hard to feel human by yourself.

This year we’re in scale-mode, despite conditions in the broader tech industry. We’ve built out our leadership team, grown our headcount by 35% to support our expansion into large enterprise accounts, hit 65% of the Fortune 500, opened new offices in Chicago and Taiwan, and introduced our most innovative AI-powered product release to date, which is called Vyond Go. It’s a great time for us.

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We’d love to hear more about Vyond’s new AI-driven capabilities and how it benefits end users? How does Vyond’s features make it different and unique?  

We’ve been applying AI to Vyond for some years already. Allowing users to create a character from a photo, automatically translate videos into more than 70 languages, remove backgrounds from pictures, enhance recorded voice overs – all to help make creating relevant videos fast and easy.

This Spring, we introduced Vyond Go, which is the industry’s first AI-powered script and video creator for business. There is a lot of hype around products that use ChatGPT for content creation, but very few applications of generative AI for video creation are really ready for primetime in the enterprise.

Vyond Go integrates generative AI right into the user workflow. Users can blow right through any “blank page issues” and generate a video script based on a few prompts and/or their own content.  Simultaneously, we generate a rough cut video based on a template chosen by the user.  The templates are composed of assets from our massive original content library, so there is no risk of copyright infringement.

When it comes to implementing videos across functions: for marketing, sales, even recruitment: there is a lot a brand needs to align. For teams looking to optimize their end to end video efforts: what would you suggest as go-to first steps?

First and foremost would be defining a clear look and style of video that’s right for your brand. Compliance with brand and style guidelines is table stakes for our customers. With that in mind, we’ve made it simple to upload company logos and corporate fonts, change the colors of key assets or templates, customize the clothing/uniforms of the characters — or even remove the characters’ facial features completely.

Our upcoming AI-powered “photo to asset” and “video to motion capture” features will enable anything in your work environment to become an asset in your Vyond library. This will make it even easier to create a “brand kit”, containing brand-approved characters, props, logos, fonts, customized templates. Admins can share these out to everyone in their organization or match different subsets of assets to different functions.

Equally important is making sure that the tools in your video suite meet the rigorous security requirements of enterprise organizations like ISO 27001, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and FedRAMP certification for government agency business. Many brands also request features such as SSO, DLP, and NIDS.

Can you share a few examples that have stood out for you of brands using video to drive sales and marketing goals? What takeaways make those examples a good reference?

I love the story about AgentSync. They provide infrastructure solutions to the insurance industry. Their content marketing team added videos to 40 of their static blog posts in the hopes of increasing engagement, pageviews, and search rankings. The average increase in pageviews was 147% but in some cases it was 200%, 300%, or even 500%. For one post, called “Insurance 101: What’s an Adjuster?” (not exactly riveting content), pageviews jumped 579% after they added a video to the original text-only post. Many  of their top performing blogs are ones with a video embedded and they’ve seen an increase in search result rankings on a number of industry-specific terms and questions.

An example on the sales side is Zoetis. They are the world’s largest producer of medicine and vaccinations for pets and livestock. They use Vyond to create sales enablement videos to quickly and efficiently onboard Zoetis sales people on Salesforce, Tableau, and other critical sales technologies. They have told us they especially like the ability to quickly create characters and assets from their own photos, and easily convert content in static presentations to video.

What are the common mistakes you still see brands make when it comes to developing or executing on video marketing strategies or when using video in sales?

I think the most common mistakes that we’ve all experienced is that business videos are often too long and take too long to get to the point. Less is more in video marketing – or really any application of business video.

If you have a lot of content, particularly as a marketer, it is better to serialize it into a “playlist” of shorter videos, rather than making one overly long video.

One of the drivers of videos being too long is a combination of “corporate speak” and “too many cooks”. Content creators for some reason feel like they need to write in formal business speak instead of plain language. That corporate speak then gets inflated as every reviewer inserts their hot button issues and/or buzzwords. The end result is long, bloated sentences filled with laundry lists of adjectives and buzzwords – that end up incomprehensible to the average reader or viewer. This is terrible in print and even worse in video. You end up with meandering dialogue or endless narration which needs to be “wallpapered” with visuals.

Another related mistake is simply taking too long to get to the point.  In a world with shrinking attention spans, cutting to the chase is essential.

What do you see in the future of your industry and how do you plan to compete?

Artificial intelligence, and specifically generative AI, is already transforming the way video content is made. In the not too distant future video creation will be as easy as “hey Vyond, make me a video”. We will be all over that.

We will compete by continuing to deploy AI within Vyond’s applications, in both existing and new workflows, to increase the productivity of our customers. We’re not a “chase shiny things” company. We’re a “drive positive business outcomes for our customers” company. Value always plays.

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