Aaron Conant  0:18 

Happy Wednesday, everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the Co-founder and managing director at BWG Connect. We're a networking knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who do exactly that. We network and knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends and strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping digital growth. I talk with 30 to 40 brands a week to stay on top of those trends when the same topics come up over and over again, that's kind of how we get the topics for these events, we'll do well north of 300 virtual events like this, this year, we're going to do 100, roughly in person, small format dinners. So if you are tier-one city, just let us know. We become the invite list for those, it's fun to get back into it. We did one in Miami, we've got two more this week in New York. So really cool to see people getting back in person and discussing digital face to face. The couple housekeeping items just as we get started here, we're starting three, four minutes after the hour, and we're going to wrap up with I don't know, four to five minutes to go on the hour as well. We're going to give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other side is we want this to be as educational informational as possible. So at any point in time you have any questions drop into the q&a section there, drop into the chat, or you can always just email me aaron@bwgconnect.com, that includes an hour after the call today, tomorrow, next week. If you have any questions in the digital space, you ever want to have a chat on it, that's what I spend a lot of my time doing, and always love those conversations. So don't ever hesitate to reach out. With that, just kind of go ahead and kick off, this topic today. It's super interesting from the standpoint of, is everybody's had this huge shift to try to look at direct to consumer. This idea of user generated content, video. A lot of times, UGC originally was, hey, snap, or Instagram or something, or maybe somebody is sending it in, they're doing a product review. In this case, we had a lot of questions around user generated video. And we can send a great friend and partner supporter of the network over Vyrill. And they're doing some amazing things in this space, but also just thought leadership across the board. So we asked Ajay here to jump on and kind of network knowledge share across the board. So send in as many questions as you have. But anyways, Ajay, I'll kick it over to you, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Vyrill, that'll be awesome. And we'll kind of jump into conversation, sound good?

Ajay Bam  2:46 

Yeah, absolutely. So Thanks, Aaron, for having me on the call here as on the panel here. And also, thank you, everyone, for joining us on this conversation. And good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. I'm based in in San Francisco. So just a quick intro on myself. I've been studying shopping behavior for about 15 years now. So previously, prior to Vyrill, I built a mobile shopping app company in Boston called Modiv Media, we have built an app where you can scan in bag inside retail stores, and you can check out on your phone. So we were cutting the lines, and increasing the basket size, inside stores and in store experiences. And then after that, I was at Nokia, the phone company, where I launched the app store in about 35 countries around the world. So I study online and offline shopping behaviors, both in store mobile and desktop. And so really started Vyrill about four and a half years ago at the UC Berkeley Machine Learning Lab. So we actually came out of the UC Berkeley Skydeck Incubator Program. And really, the story behind starting Vyrill was very simple. I began noticing a trend which is customers and shoppers are now watching a lot of videos before they shop. So reviews unboxing videos, how to videos, infomercials, and it really varies by category. And they're also creating a lot of content as well after they shop. So people upload videos on how happy excited they are about their new car, or the feature they love. Or if they have very strong opinions, negative opinions as well. They're not shy about sharing that online anymore. So brands and retailers now have millions of videos across multiple platforms. And so how do you really harness the power of video and when I say video, everything from UGC content to branded videos to your influencer videos and more, is really what we're working on here at Vyrill. And so we help brands and retailers increase revenue and find new customers by leveraging authentic video content, such as reviews, unboxing videos, how to videos and more along with the branded video content for insight, dimension and content marketing. So at a very high level, think of us as a Google for commerce video. And we're also one of the few companies in the world that can Google inside the video as well. And I'll share more during the conversation. So yeah, so I've been in this retail and online space for a very long time, pretty much most of my life. And so, video is sort of where things are headed. And we'll chat more. Oh, Aaron, you're on mute.

Aaron Conant  5:41 

Sorry we had the police car going by and I had to mute for a second here. New York is always fun to broadcast from. So, this is something that's popped up is, you're talking about video. I mean, TikTok is a perfect example. And, this is kind of where I think we originally started chatting a while ago was like, a lot of brands reach out or we've had a bunch of calls like, how do we get a viral TikTok video? How do we get video as a whole to go viral? And the tough part is, you're trying to push it if you're trying to create it, like, everybody wants something authentic. And if you're paying somebody to do it, a lot of times it's not authentic. And is that ability to go out and that's where we start talking was like, how do you find those that are really going viral on their own and utilizing that and then utilizing it in a fair manner in regards to who created it. So you're going out and actually, like scouring the web? Like, how exactly does it work? Are you bringing in this UGC that brands aren't necessarily paying for up front right?

Ajay Bam  6:50 

Yeah. So, first of all, I want to say that UGC just to give you a sense, how big this UGC content is, shoppers are now and customers are now creating content on 35 platforms in 89 languages. And these platforms vary by country generally, generally, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram are generally the common platforms, if you will, but then there are specific platforms in different geographies as well. So for example, in India, there's a app that's really literally a replica of TikTok, which is called Josh. So in general, brands like just a couple of examples, Porsche has over 29 million videos on YouTube alone, and 95% of that content is user generated. And then L'Oreal has over 16 million videos across their 40 brands, beauty brands, so again, this is just YouTube. So Nike has over 18 million videos on YouTube. So it's quite massive, right. So how we do it, how we harness and how we find discover content is, we have really architected the solution around product catalogs. So on our system, you can actually track all your video content by brand, category, product. So literally, we are able to find videos that at product skew level. And from very early on, when we started the company, we realized that it was very important to find all the data at product skew level. And the reason is, when customers are buying they're looking at reviews, they're looking at content, they're interested in, in in video content that essentially the skew that they're searching for. So giving, bringing all the content at skew level for us, was a very important problem to solve. And we also track all competitor data as well. And the way we do that is we actually leverage all the product catalog data to go find all the videos and more so on our platform, essentially, you can set up your entire you can upload your product catalog, then all we need is really the product name, description and you can also upload an image of the product. And we use that data to go look for go find UGC content and all your content around your brand and that can include your content and your branded content and influence the content as well. That's resonating on social media. So we start with the product catalog. And you can also add hashtags and more. And then we use YouTube API's and other mechanisms to go find and match videos from the from YouTube to your entire product catalog. So we have matching algorithms that can match the video to product category, brand competitor keyword and hashtag and once we match we then analyze what's actually what's inside the video. And so, the way we've architected this is we're able to deliver all the skewed data at skew level. And so for matching, we do everything from we start with all the metadata around the video so with text, and then we look at transcript and images. So in that order, and so what we found is just even with texts alone, the accuracy with that we have is about 92%, which are matching algorithms. So yeah, and so we're able to find video content across multiple platforms, and really match that and to give brands very skewed perspective on all the data.

Aaron Conant  10:41 

So is that creating the library? Or is it populating directly into a direct consumer site or both? And then I'm also thinking you're talking about, like, Amazon has a huge push for videos as a whole, are you then able to push that UGC? Potentially and upload it to Amazon from unboxing, or use video or Walmart wherever?

Ajay Bam  11:07 

Yeah, so we source video, essentially, from multiple platforms. So the first category of platforms is social media platforms like YouTube, which YouTube alone has more product reviews, and unboxing videos and all that, then Instagram and TikTok combined. So YouTube is a major source where shoppers go to find reviews, and more. So we pull videos from YouTube, we pull videos from another category of platforms like Dropbox, so a lot of brands have video sitting in their folders. And so we're able to essentially pull all that video on our dashboard. And so that's the second category of source. The third is eCommerce platforms as well. So after purchases made, we can capture videos from the shopper after the purchases made. And then of course, we're continuing to extend our integrations into other platforms. There's a lot of content creation platforms like Vimeo, and Clip Jump. And that's also something that we plan to integrate on our platform. So we capture videos from multiple sources. And really what we're doing is we're making to your point where absolutely, we're indexing all your content, and we're making the inside of the content useful and searchable. So the key to video commerce, really, in my opinion, is what's inside the video. And so helping brands understand what's inside the UGC video is very fundamental and very important thing that we do. And so essentially after we as I mentioned before we match videos to products. And after we do the matching, we then analyze the audio, the text and the images. And we analyze all of this to add all of this in nine dimensions. So everything from sentiment analysis of the audio, so we can actually showcase positive and negative sentences, comments, keywords and phrases that people have expressed inside the video about your brand and product. We analyze all the with computer vision all the people in the videos, by age, ethnicity, and gender, we look at diversity, which is a big thing these days for brands. So looking at race, language and country, we flagged the video for brand safety as well. So nudity minor. So there's a lot of laws around the world where you can and cannot use under 13 in the videos, and then we also flagged the video for profanity as well. So brand safety is another big feature of the product. And then we track engagement, we can look at the historical the videos are coming from social, we can actually look at the last 30 videos, and we can tell you whether the creator of that content is an expert or fan or celebrity or press or brand and so on scene analysis 600 scenes and landmarks and all that. So essentially, and we also analyze topics as well as we analyze up to 100 topics inside a video we can actually tell you if the video is a review unboxing video but is it also talking about lipstick and mascara, if it's a beauty category, and so on. And so we're really creating a system for brands to really rate and rank all their video content on the brand dashboard. And so you mentioned Amazon it's very interesting where what Amazon is doing right now. So if you open any Amazon page, it's now leading with videos now. So Amazon actually next in the image carousel, you actually have a video section now and if you open the video section, you can see videos for that product. But Amazon is also showing you videos for related products and more. So they've already built some sort of a tool to improve and enhance the experience with all things video. And then if you scroll down on Amazon product page to the third or the fourth row, you actually now see a UGC, carousel as well. So you can see all the UGC content that shoppers have uploaded, after they have made a purchase. And Amazon now has amassed about 250 million video reviews on their platform, which means that customers will now expect videos on product beyond PDP pages as they begin and start the shopping journey. So and then to finally to wrap up, you asked whether we are sort of a syndication tool for capturing and then distributing content, and absolutely we are. We're integrating with many platforms, and we just actually first built our first integration with Shopify, and you can now publish videos from the world dashboard to your Shopify, PDPs, and more. And then, of course, we're building integrations into Amazon's and more channel partners as well. So that's something in the works right now.

I love it from the standpoint, the cost of generation of content has gone through the roof. And so in this case, the cost is, well, the generation is zero. But then, is there a compensation on the back end for the creators? And I have a couple questions that have come in. And just to reminder, others you have questions drop in the chat, drop them in the q&a, or email them to me, aaron@bwgconnect.com. So, the first one basically is, are you paying anything back? Or how do you actually get the rights to the content?

Yeah, absolutely. So let me just quickly, just a quick intro on licensing. So, anytime you're using a video on your PDPs, or anything, if you're monetizing from social video, you absolutely have to acquire the rights to that video. So in our case, when we capture videos from social media campaigns, we also capture the email address of the creator. And so once we capture the email address, we also facilitate licensing as well. So we have a single one-year global licensing model, where you can lessons the video for one year, and you can essentially require the right to that video, you can slice and dice the video in any form or shape, you can also cross-promote that video that you just licensed both on your PDPs, but also on your social media and other platforms as well. And so there are multiple types of rewards on our system that we offer. The first is purely cash payments. And we facilitate that through PayPal. So essentially, creators are required to register their PayPal email address when the whole licensing process and when that's enabled. And so it's really done for payouts as well. So capturing the email address. And of course, anytime you're doing payments, you do need to know who the customer is and where they are, and all of that. So if it's a PayPal payment, we do that. And then also you can also offer other intangible, high rewards as well, could be free product, or it could be a credit towards your next purchase. If you're interested in driving, having to show your shoppers upload a video, acquire the licensing right to that video, and then have them make a repeat purchase. So you can offer also offer credits as well with codes and of course, perhaps even a promo code to redeem something on your website or in-store. So we offer the whole gamut. And, really the one-year licensing is generally or the average life of the product is usually one year, unless it's in the automotive or some other categories. We can always facilitate a longer licensing as well. But it is absolutely fundamental to acquire the licensing right on a social video before you leverage the video in the content.

Aaron Conant  18:59 

Awesome. So question comes in around like categories. Do you see this over indexing on certain categories? We have one more after that and others have questions keep dropping them in the chat the q&a or emailing them to me.

Ajay Bam  19:12 

Yeah, absolutely. So that's actually a very good question. So generally, I believe that in future every category is going to start lead with a video. But at the moment, I'll tell you a little bit about the top categories where there's massive amounts of video consumption and creation. So it's the number one is really beauty, followed by fashion CPG travel, Home Improvement, DIY category, electronics is another big one, automotive is big. And so essentially these are some of the top verticals where there's massive, massive amount and of course sports media and music and entertainment as well are the other categories. So there are about, I would say 12 to 15 categories that absolutely get massive amounts of video consumption and creation. But we're seeing that extended to other categories as well as Amazon continues to introduce videos across multiple categories. In fact, during Amazon's launch, they launch a new store where you can watch videos and buy products. And they initially started with about these eight categories that I mentioned before. And now it's been extended to pretty much, they're adding almost new categories every quarter. So it's driven by both that category, and especially where there's a lot of either education, or people want to see what other people are doing. So makeup is a perfect category, where people like to see how other people are doing makeup is also driven by the price point as well. Anytime a shopper is making a purchase, that's more than $50, they start doing product research. And so really, video is a very valuable tool for product research. So if you think of video, what we found in our research is that 85% of shoppers say that video increases their brand trust by 20x. Because they can see the product, the person and the emotions inside the video. And also it cuts down on review fraud, text review fraud as well. Because with text, you don't know if it was created by a bot, or if the person actually on the product. But with video, you can actually see the video in action at the product in action. And also with video, it's much easier to detect fake as well. You can actually see if someone is reading something in a video. And so video has a lot of like brand trust, it increases brand trust dramatically. And so you see, anytime a purchase is more than $50 customers will do more research. And then that's where Video plays a big role, whether it's how to video unboxing video, it's interesting when it comes to video type unboxing, there are more than 2 billion unboxing videos. And when we did further research on that we found that customers, they always are suspicious of what they're getting into and what they will be offered when they open the packaging. So I don't know, if you've had an experience where you've purchased something that requires batteries in the label, it's a torx slide or toy, and the batteries are missing in the next thing you know, you don't actually get that aha experience. The moment you open the box, you now have to go to Home Depot and get the battery pack right to experience that. So customers are they don't always trust what they see. And that's really where video plays a big role and the price point is a big factor as well, when it comes to videos.

Aaron Conant  22:57 

So a lot of people just want to know, what are the most popular types of videos? Is it an unboxing as a product demo? What are the most popular?

Ajay Bam  23:09 

Yeah, so it's a couple of things. The way you should think about the type of videos is really breaking it down into brand videos and UGC content. So UGC content, when it comes to UGC, content reviews are very important. So, for every category, there are three or four types of video that drives convergence. So as you're thinking about, what video content to create produce, with both your fans, or what content should you produce, I would say that, for example, in the beauty category, it's always reviews unboxing videos, how-to videos and infomercial from the product, about the product. So those are sort of the four videos that absolutely drive conversion. And I would say that your breakdown of that content should be 20% branded videos and 80% UGC content. And so in the example that I just gave, the infomercial would be a branded video, and the other three videos would come from your fans, and now this varies by verticals. So for example, in the automotive category, it generally tends to be reviews, tends to be dealership videos, inside and outside tour of the car. And then of course, perhaps an infomercial about the key benefits or the key features of the car, from the automotive from the OEM or the brand. So again, this will vary by in the electronics category, it's reviews, and unboxing videos, and then how to videos really depends. And then in the health category, for example, it's reviews, but it's also a lot of educational videos, right? If there's a particular ingredient that adds a benefit, and is that as a health benefit, then it's important to perhaps have an expert talk about it. I'm just making looking this up, but there's a lot of vitamins with turmeric. So if you're a health company and health product company, have a review, but then also have an expert talk about inside a video talk about the health benefits of turmeric. Again, it's helping customers build trust with your brand, and build trust with your product. So depending on the vertical, that there's three or four types of videos, that make the in that make a huge difference. And if you have the right type of content, it also helps brands, but it also helps shoppers really make a very informed purchase decision. And this also leads into actually reducing returns as well. So what they found is actually during COVID, there's a big study that came out, that essentially was tied to videos, and they found that returns can reduce by 20 to 50% when customers make informed purchase decisions, and they're buying the right product. So it can have a huge impact on your bottom line as well with approaching video and the right type of video at the right moment in the shopping journey.

Aaron Conant  26:06 

So a question comes in what kind of videos do you see most popular in the food vertical aside from recipes, I think which is pretty straightforward? So the food the consumable, space as a whole?

Ajay Bam  26:18 

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things in the food CPG business other than recipes. Unboxing is very important. People are now reading labels on packaging, on what's in the product, is there a construct is there no construct? So that's very important. The other is,  people are also not concerned these days whether the packaging is recyclable. So talking to your packaging, as well, can you recycle it, how to recycle, where to recycle. Then the other is, if you have particular ingredients that offer particular food benefits, as I mentioned before, you can have an expert talk to, if it's blueberries, you know, in your ears as one of the main ingredients in a product, have someone talk about the health benefits of blueberries as well. So those are some of the types of videos in the food CPG category, that can make a huge difference. And then finally, also tasting as well. So having that, I don't know if you've seen this, but sometimes, when you're offered these freebies at food shows, and you taste something incredible. And it's like wow, right. And capturing that reaction from the customer, when they're sipping the first drink for the first time, or tasting something for the first time actually, and capturing that aha moment, can also be very valuable in the food CPG space. So, if you're actually able to now in person events have started again, if you're actually able to capture some of these customer reactions, when you're either offering a free product, or as we've seen this before, pre COVID, Whole Foods and grocers always had these tasting booths all around the store. And so those are some of the places as well where you can capture some authentic UGC reactions to your tastings and more.

Aaron Conant  26:39 

Awesome, so I think, it's kind of coming off from the conversation we're having at the beginning, which is around live streaming, as well. So live streaming is taking off, how do you see a blend of this with live streaming? What does that balance look like? And some of the things that we were talking about, and I was like, you can reuse that right? That live stream event? Anyway, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Ajay Bam  28:42

Yeah, absolutely. So just to kick off the conversation on live streaming. Last year, China is the leader right now when it comes to live-streaming shopping experiences. 7% of purchases on Alibaba in 2020 came from a live streaming video. And essentially what's interesting about live streaming is that it offers a chance for customers or shoppers to see who's behind the brand. We've seen on live streams you have everyone from influencers talking about why they love the product to actually having the brand managers the product managers talk about why they aligned. So really sharing the stories behind the product, and how the product can benefit the customer and Livestream offers a chance due for live interaction with the brand and really get the bottom line is it helps shoppers answered the burning questions they have about the product and brand. Also gives authenticity as well to your brand as well. They can actually see who's behind the product. And of course but having said that, live streaming also has its pros and cons, the pro is of course a live interaction. But the con is, you have to get the customer on board, when you're actually live-streaming the event, right. And sometimes shoppers are busy, they're doing other stuff. So it has its pros and cons. Mow with live streaming, it works and but after the live stream ends, you can also and we were discussing, this is what we were discussing Aaron was, there are many ways to actually repurpose live streaming. You can essentially analyze the video right after the live stream ends. And that's something that we do here at Vyrill as well. And you can repurpose that video beyond the live stream, on your PDPs and on your social media as well. And so essentially, with live streaming, you can also bring live streaming to your PDPs as well. And that's also something that at Vyrill we're working on is as the live stream happens, bring that live feed into your online store. And so as people are browsing your pages, and perhaps they are on a particular product page, and then perhaps there's another tab where they can actually see live streamings either in that category around other products or perhaps as a live stream going on for that particular product as well. So you can then create a mechanism to distribute the live stream to your social, your PDPs. And then also leverage the live stream after it ends as well. And Aaron, the bottom line, again is for video commerce is no one has the time to watch videos. And so you have to make that content useful and searchable. And that's actually the key thing that here at Vyrill, the problem we have solved is, I'll give you an example. So let's say we're all buying a car and you're buying a BMW, you have now landed on a BMW product page, there 20 videos, and let's say, Aaron, you're buying a car with leather seats, and I'm buying a car with child seats. How do we know when we arrive on that page, which video is featuring leather seats versus which video is featuring talking about child seats. And so what we have done at Vyrill is we make all that video content searchable. We actually offer on your PDP, a search bar, on top of your videos. And on our dashboard, we make all that content searchable. And you can now publish the video from the brand dashboard to your PDPs. And essentially the problem we have solved is, you can instantly search leather seats and or Chelsea's inside the video. And we can take you to that portion of the video where they're talking about that feature. And the person can just watch that portion of the video and purchase the product. So this actually saves massive, massive amounts of time. It helps customers get to all the shopping questions they have, and get answers to them, both from UGC content and from branded videos. And then tying this back to the I brought this up because tying get back to live streaming, live streaming, generally, the videos tend to be 30 minutes to an hour-long, might feature one product or multiple products. And so when you start to repurpose live streaming, no one has the time to watch 30-minute videos. And that's where in video searches is going to be fundamental to video commerce or to both live streaming and in general for video. And that's a very key problem we have solved. So from the very beginning, Vyrill has been focused on both matching videos at skew and then making all that content searchable and useful so customers can instantly find the answers they're looking for. And really, at a very high-level Google saw this with indexing texts. And so we're doing something similar for all things video and making that in video content searchable and useful for all types of videos.

Aaron Conant  34:07 

Yeah, it's super interesting, I didn't think of it, eCommerce has gotten so expensive in so many different ways. The ability to generate content for free and then pay for it afterwards if it's working, which is essentially what's happening here. But also the ability to sift through it all. On an AI platform because you said hey, nobody has time to watch all the videos from a customer standpoint. Yes. Now even more so on the brand side, right and the internal company to be able to go through every single one that's out there. You have AI do a filtration and then give you the top ones that are most likely to convert on-page for you to go through and select. I think it's just overwhelming like you said, like...

Ajay Bam  35:05 

I'll give you a short case study. I mean, we recently, we held a big CPG brand analyzed 12,000 videos in their cheese category in 2016 categories. So we were able to match 12,000 videos to these 26 cheese categories. And they were interested in finding what people are saying with UGC content for all these 26 cheese categories. So we analyze 12,000 videos in 13 days, what would have taken the brand, about nine and a half months to manually watch a video when on average, these videos are about 12 minutes long. And really, there were three purposes and three ways how brands actually leveraged all the insight. So first one was they were interested in finding the top fans and influencers who are talking about each of these cheese categories. And so they wanted to understand who they were understand the demographic and diversity data. And they were also interested in then engaging with these influences as well to produce more content. You can imagine recipes, a massive UGC category. There's literally trillions of recipes, if I can say that they literally are for all kinds of CPG products. So they really wanted to understand, first of all, like, who's making the video, understand what they're seeing inside the video about the product and brand. We also delivered a list of all keywords and phrases by cheese category. And upon further analysis, the brand actually discovered some new relationships within ingredients, products and diets. And so they're using that information for new product development. And then, finally, they're also licensing a bunch of content as well for promotion, UGC content that featured their product for promotion both on their social media channels, and on their PDPs as well. And I'll say just one big discovery for them was when we analyze the videos was we also analyzed all their ads that they had produced in the last eight years. And what they found was 80% of the ads were featuring to Caucasian men in their late in 60s and 40s. And what's interesting about that was, they had sort of an aha moment on that. And they were actually the founders of the company that were featured in the ads, for obvious reasons. But the discovery was, they're interested now in targeting Hispanic and Asian populations. And the discovery from the video analysis was wow, less than 1% of that UGC content, and even their own promotions, feature Hispanic and Asian populations. So, the bottom line is people want to see people like them buying the product, right. And so they're now producing content in these other demographic and with other featuring other target demographic. And so having that analysis, actually having that data that they were missing out on, that was actually very helpful and very useful for them to build out their content marketing strategy.

Aaron Conant  38:14 

Yeah. In our conversation, like, I was thinking, like, well, how do we use these videos to convert sales, which is the key thing people want, but it completely passed me by the amount of information you can gather in a short amount of time, but you hear about this all the time, are you have a brand thinking, their target grab demographic is a certain target demographic, and they do actually a deep dive, and they see they're off by 10 or 20 years in the age group? Or in your case, like, who are they actually going after? What they want to grow with? And then what is the content look like? So does a company like are you providing just that service as well, where a company can come in and just say, hey, tell us what the real story is, right? This is what we've done. Because, in the past, a lot of it was just like, guessing and waiting for data and guessing waiting for data. With this much UGC being generated, there's a massive amounts of data that just need to be analyzed. AI now you can finally do it right without trying to set six people in a room for seven months randomly taking notes.

Ajay Bam  39:28 

So we have sort of the discovery. And the insights component is a platform which is usually often leveraged by a lot of most all brands and retailers on the platform. And with their you can start if you don't have a lot of video content, you can still leverage the platform for tracking all your competitors. So you can get insights on what people are saying about competitive products, positive or negative. And we can give you by product, we can give you positive sentiment, negative sentiment that people are expressing about your product and the competitors. product. The other is you can also upload all your videos as well, we can give you a full analysis of your own content that you have produced in the last year, since a life of your company or perhaps in the last couple of years. And then you can also compare your data versus your videos versus your UGC content. And it's always interesting, like, we work with a lot of brands, and you just see in every single time has performed by 10x,  compared to branded video content. But coming to your point, absolutely, discovery and indexing and insights is a big component of the platform. And of course, the other big component is the commerce is how do you publish and leverage video on product pages as well. So yeah, you can do either or both. It's just growing. Video is always growing. I mean, there's a new platform every year. And so video is not stopping at all, if anything, we will continue to see massive, massive growth in video. I mean, again, TikTok, only three years, four years old, TikTok has produced more content in one year than the last 20 years.

Aaron Conant  41:16 

I think the average time per day is like 80 plus minutes at some ridiculous amount, and it's all video. But I really like the other side, is people always want to know, what's being said about their product. And then if you can work that into new product design, like you're getting almost real-time feedback. I shouldn't say that. A lot of times people are more apt to leave a negative review, jars hard to open, you hear that like 50 60 times, then product design comes back into play, right? You could just taste, you could color even if its size fit.

Ajay Bam  42:03 

Yeah, we just had a brand that wanted to do a UGC study on privacy, it's one of the largest brands in the world. And they were concerned that people are talking about privacy of data in their videos. And as their product is in that category, and it's in the electronics category. And it turns out from after we analyzed over 40,000 videos, that wasn't much of that big of a concern as a brand, thought it might have been. And in the process, they also discovered some of the top features of the product, that are very popular that they talk to their customers. And so what the brand did now is they're elevating that feature now outside the video, they're elevating that feature in their messaging, also on their social media channels, as well. So again, you never know what people are thinking. And so UGC offers that insight, and that capability and also like, sometimes there's a feature of the card, sometimes even It's the color of a particular color of lipstick, that starts to resonate with people for other reasons. And it takes off. And so how do you highlight that? How do you know that's happening?

Aaron Conant  43:11 

You can't not be doing this at this point in time. I mean, with video taking over as quickly as it is all forms, you think a lot of brands and they still should do it. They mind the ratings and reviews for data right over and over again. Okay, what do we need to address, one of the key features when we build into bullet points. Now, there's rapidly becoming more actually dated to be sifted through, actually on the video side, where you're mining the same data, but from a better data source. And there's going to be more of it really quickly.

Ajay Bam  43:46 

Yeah, I would say that what really matters, the bottom line is what shoppers care about is authenticity, experience and emotions. And UGC delivers on that. So as brands and retailers are thinking about leveraging UGC content, there's a lot of worry, there brands sometimes have about the perfection in the video, the perfect background, the perfect resolution. The good news is a lot of that those features have already been taken care of by the new Apple iPhone 13 or the Android pixel six. So what we find is in the last three years, the resolution of the cameras have improved dramatically. The quality of production on simple video has dramatically increased. I mean, there are now Oscar movies that are being made with an iPhone and that get rewards and win awards on doctors and stuff. Right. My point is, I would recommend that don't the overall the production quality of UGC content is generally very good these days. Do not worry about the perfection. I think, worry about authenticity. If there's one feedback I have or one insight I have is the bottom line is customers do not care how fancy a video is, they care about whether the video actually answers the questions they're looking for? And do they see the experience in the video, whether it's an unboxing video when they open up or it's a how-to video on how to fix something. That's what they're looking for. So focus on authenticity, both when you're leveraging UGC and also in your branded video content as well. If you look at a lot of new Samsung ads, they're all featuring a lot of shoppers talking about Samsung products and UGC as well. I mean, we're seeing that across the board. And then the other comment I have is, as we're coming close to the time is think about QR codes as well. QR codes have really taken off. And I think if you saw the Superbowl ad the most popular about ads, is the QR code moving across the screen. Right? Of course it was coin base.

Aaron Conant  45:52 

And it actually hit the corner. Everybody likes where are you waiting for?

Ajay Bam  45:58 

Yeah, QR code behaviors have changed. And I would strongly recommend. QR codes has become a new mechanism for shoppers to discover more about the product. You can use a QR code on packaging for in store shopping experience. So as people are walking around the retail store, they pick up your product, you can tie that QR code to video experience. And you can sort of increase your ROI increase the interaction with your shoppers as well with video. We also find that any interaction with the video whether is asking customers to give a thumbs up thumbs down offering in video search, offering contests, offering surprises on top as you're watching a video any kind of interaction will increase completion rates of video by about 90%. So tie your QR code journeys to some sort of interactions and even video content as well. For in-store, and especially QR codes are really the beginning to take off. Nike has introduced QR codes on all their packaging and product as well. And it's become something that even I scan QR codes now at least once or twice a day, looking at a menu at a restaurant or scanning something else. And of course, you've noticed payments as well, if you're at a payment terminal, you can now actually see a QR code or you can just scan the QR code and pay the merchant as well. So these behaviors are now they're here. They're here to stay in my opinion and of course people are realizing the benefits as well. Magazines, if you open the United travel magazine, a lot of ads product has now have QR codes, you can actually scan the QR code, learn more about that product. But also if that product offers other flavors, other colors, QR code is a good mechanism for also customers to see other videos of other your product as similar products or similar skews or other skews related to your product and brand. So multiple ways of actually thinking about QR codes video and generally your shopping experience.

Aaron Conant  48:04 

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times we think of a oh, we need a direct to consumer site. But no, you don't, you just have it on your own branded site, have a QR code, nobody's typing in a web page, right? The QR code, a restaurant even payments at restaurants now, right? Logging back into a streaming service, they know just put the QR code and scan, it'll take you to the webpage. But then in this case, have that on your packaging. And if it's there, people can scan it and take it right to a video page or a detail page around, hey, this is everything that's in it.

Ajay Bam  48:41 

Or introduce them to other similar products in your category if you're selling others or other colors perhaps right. So again, I think it's a great way to engage and interact and bring some interaction to your digital experience.

Aaron Conant  48:55 

Yeah. Awesome. Love it. I do the check really quick here and to see if there's any last questions that people want to send them in, feel free to do it now. I think this has just been, again, an awesome conversation. It just, the mining of data is so huge and the ability to do that. I'd encourage anybody have a follow-up conversation with a team at Vyrill. They're great friends, partner supporters, the network, I think there's some invaluable insights to be mined from the data, they're able to look at and scan from UGC where you getting an authentic information back from people that are using your product. Any key takeaways here as we wrap up.

Ajay Bam  49:39 

Yeah, I would say that a couple of things. One is, video is becoming a must-have versus nice to have to improve your key KPIs. And video can drive essentially revenue and it can bring new customers as well. I would say build an 80 20 strategy of leading your PDPs or aside with 80%, UGC content, and 20% branded content. Authenticity, experience and emotions matter, so video actually humanizes the whole brand connection. So think about bringing authenticity to your site, to your product, to your experience. Also, the key to video commerce is three things first is offering in video search for your shoppers, personalization, so people want to see people like them buying the product. So when someone lands on the product page, if it's a 19-year-old female, and I'm just making this up, and they're visiting your beauty site, have a you know, having the first video that pops up, that features a person who looks like them, it can be very, very important and can drive conversion. And then finally there. The third key aspect is SEO as well. So today, the challenge with video is that when Google is indexing your website, your eCommerce site or your brand side, Google has a big problem today, which is any times it encounters the video on a page, it doesn't know what's inside the video. So one of the things we do at Vyrill is we're actually solving that problem. So when we index and make all your video content searchable, we generate a transcript. And we're also generating all 50 plus AI tags of what's inside your videos. So when we publish a video to product pages on our app that's integrated with your PDPs. We offer these three things in video search from stylization, and SEO. So we offer essentially, all the tags. And we want to inform the search engine that hey, this video is brand safe. So the biggest fear that Google has had, putting videos in the search results is brand safety. Because of a lot of brand safety regulation, you can have nudity, you can't have minors, you can write all of that. So SEO is a very key important feature of the videos. If you do the S Video SEO right, you can actually then increase your conversion by helping drive videos up on your search results as well. And that's something that, so we add transcript, and we add all the AI text of Google search engines in general, can read better. And so I would say that, and then the finally engage your customers post-purchase as well. So that's another opportunity for you to either capture a video from them or engage them in a complementary product with a video that can help them. I mean, I just during this holiday season, it was very interesting. I bought a jacket, and I received a message for buying pants with a promo code and leading me to your PDP with a video right. So all of this ultimately will drive towards those two key KPIs which is increased conversion and find new customers. So I would say that those are some of the key takeaways that I would strongly encourage the audience's think about.

Aaron Conant  53:04 

Awesome. Awesome, my friend. Well, thanks again for your time today. Thanks for being great friends, partners and supporters, the network. Again, anyone I'd encourage you have a follow-up conversation with Ajay and the team at Vyrill. They're doing some pretty amazing stuff up there and come highly recommended from a ton of brands.

Ajay Bam  53:20 

And mine is very easy. It's just ajay@vyrill.com. As simple as that. Yeah, I'll just put it in the chat for everyone. It's ajay@vyrill.com. I just put it in the piece.

Aaron Conant  53:37 

Yeah, I mean anybody, at any point in time you ever want to have a conversation more than happy to connect you with him as well. With that, we're going to wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday. Have a great rest of the week. Everybody take care. Stay safe. Look forward to having you in the future event. Ajay, thanks so much again, you guys are crushing it. Thanks so much, my friend.

Ajay Bam  53:55 

Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day. Thanks. Cheers. Bye