ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Dave Erickson 0:00
Are you going crazy trying to make marketing videos for your business? You know these videos are critical for marketing, but it just seems to take too much time. On this ScreamingBox podcast, we're going to discuss how AI is transforming business video production. Please like our podcast and subscribe to our channel to get notified when the next podcast is released.

Dave Erickson 0:37
Video is now a critical part, if not the most important, part, of today's online marketing. But today's algorithms demand more content more often just to stay visible. So how do you stand out with original, effective content without burning out or drowning in production demands. Welcome to the ScreamBox technology and business rundown podcast. In this podcast, we are going to look at how AI can help companies generate quality marketing content flows with Lisa Vecchio, marketing lead at Veed. Lisa is a global b2b marketing leader who spent 20 years proving that marketing can be bold, human and generally growth driving. She's built and scaled SaaS brands across the US, UK, Europe and Australia, leading go to market strategies that unite product, sales and marketing around meaningful, measurable outcomes. Now she is leading marketing at Veed, an AI video creation platform built for marketeers and entrepreneurs who not only need to go from idea to publishable video in a single workflow, they need to generate a continuous content stream. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Vecchio 1:51
Thanks. Dave, delighted to be here.

Dave Erickson 1:53
To begin with, what got you into marketing in the first place?

Lisa Vecchio 1:58
Oh, this is a bold question. I think a lot of people say they fall into it, but not me. I like to say that I'm a marketer by design. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I was in college, when I was in university, trying to figure out what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life, I wanted to make sure that it was purpose driven, something that also came very natural to me. So to keep a long story short, I actually sat down and wrote down all the things that I enjoy doing and what I think I'm good at. Three things stood out. One was storytelling. One was actually influencing, actually my parents that I should be a lawyer. Interpret that as you will. And then the third was actually like planning and events and bringing people together. And that led me down this path of comms and public relations and all those things kind of are part of the bigger picture of what makes marketing.

Dave Erickson 2:43
Great? Well, most marketers are storytellers. That's kind of a key point. But then you kind of also went into technology a little bit, or at least working with technology products. Was there something that drew you to technology, because as a marketing person, you can market, you know, wheat or electronics or anything, right? So was there something in specific that you liked?

Lisa Vecchio 3:05
I think I did fall into that by accident, so that was less intentional. I, One of my first jobs out of, out of school was with Forrester Research. So, like, kind of working with CIOs and, you know, senior leaders and actually planning events to help them think of, you know, show them what's coming next. And then I actually went into the world of Ed Tech and publishing. And the reason that kind of then that was, like the precursor to me getting into SaaS for the next kind of 15 or so years was It was during this time when teaching went from being very kind of print and textbook driven to being online driven and being part of that storytelling and educating educators on like the shift of how people learn and learning through, you know, LMSs and course materials and things like that, was not something I purposely, purposefully did, but then actually opened all these doors to other tech companies who were kind of riding the wave of visual transformation,

Dave Erickson 3:57
And as a result, you've kind of gotten some experience over the years at different technology products. Then you got to Veed and focusing more on a marketing product. Were the companies you worked for before? Were they marketing products, or were they more b2b technical products? And you just did the marketing?

Lisa Vecchio 4:21
Interesting. I've tried a lot of things on for size, and that's everything from, like, company scale stage to, yeah, what sectors I was in? So I was in edtech for almost 10 years. I got into the charity sector. So no, not too technical, charity fundraising technology. I went into some health tech products, early, early stage startups. But then I went to the opposite end of the world. I went to Expedia like a very, very large company, and this was for their b2b enterprise white label solution. So think airlines and big kind of the world running behind hotel stock and things like that. After that, I kind of fell into. A company called HootSuite, their social media management tool. And I think that's really when I identified that, like, scale stage of a company, when they're kind of, they've done the scrappy startup stuff, they're starting to mature. They want someone to come in and build out their, operationalize their, their marketing team. But marketing to marketers is just like it was fun. I could relate. It felt meaningful. I think in my personal life, I'm a mentor. I like to help support marketers with that journey. So it just felt like that, that good energy between the two things. When I left there, I ended up going to a SaaS company in the sales go to market sort of space, a company called AirCall, very, very different, but still kind of in that go to market motion tech stack. And so when the opportunity came up, I think not only was it marketing back to marketers, but this journey that we're on with AI at this stage of kind of where companies are with AI, was just a really exciting time to, I think, make an impact and learn a lot along the way as well.

Dave Erickson 5:58
So over the past 10 years or so, a lot has changed in marketing. What, What were the things that kind of surprised you about those changes? What are the changes that you feel that has been most impactful over the last 10 years in the way that people market things?

Lisa Vecchio 6:16
Well that’s such a big question. I think it's like, it's no surprise that I think in the we'll talk maybe your audience more b2b, b2c, a blend of both?

Dave Erickson 6:29
Both of us are in the b2b space. Okay, we'll always focus on b2b.

Lisa Vecchio 6:32
Yeah, so and I think, but I think this answer goes with everything is, you know, a lot of business strategies are very digitally, digital First oriented, right? I think the biggest shift that we've seen, but we're also seeing, is this shift in search. And when I say shift in search, I'm not just talking about LLMs and everything we're experiencing there, but also social becoming the new search. And so, you know, we've known that, like, let's say, when we look at what top marketing trends, what we're going to start seeing shift that seeing shift that, like video has been on the top list for everyone for 10 years. Oh, video is coming, and you need to pay attention. You do do more video, but I think now is probably the most important time for that, because of the way YouTube is influencing the LLMs, in the way that YouTube content and long form content is being broken down and search oriented for what's going to, you know, be discoverable on tick tock and Instagram and this whole world. And I'm going to sit here and say, yeah, these are channels that b2b marketers and businesses should be paying attention to, too. So I think that's probably one of the biggest shifts. And kind of this idea that b2b shouldn't have to be boring like, it also means that b2b isn't using like, what you think is boring, traditional, you know, fit in this kind of square box tactics for their go to market. We really need to be multi channel, meeting our customers, where they are in their playgrounds that are outside of, you know, just getting that during working hours per se.

Dave Erickson 7:58
You brought up an interesting topic, and that is search. And I think search is really evolving very quickly, and for those who produce content flows, and content flows nowadays can no longer be just a single used to be just put out tech stuff. Now it's got to be visual. It's got to be animated, it's got to be video. It's got to be everything, right? It seems to me that a lot of these platforms: YouTube, but Tiktok and others, they never emphasize search, right? They were just putting content out in a place to kind of stage content, and people would just find it organically. They don't really have a lot of advanced search, or they haven't it, is that changing? Is the search in the, in the way that people find content, particularly video content, which usually doesn't have great descriptions or descriptions that actually accurately describe the video content? How is that evolving? Or what kind of a challenge do you see that to be, well,

Lisa Vecchio 9:02
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Everything should be optimized for search now. I think, you know, when it used to just be fun, I'm going to post a video because I want my cousin to see my new dog or, you know, whatever. That's a different if it's a different thing, or you've got a hobby and you're just, you know, I don't, maybe just sharing it for fun. Not only should obviously, all of your youtube content be optimized for discovery, discoverability and LLMs, we're going through an exercise. Now. I can't tell you how many YouTube subscribers we have, but it's significant that YouTube's been a huge part of our discoverability strategy for years, and it's really what gave us an edge in our. in our early days. But what the difference is, is probably content we published five, six years ago, probably still feeding the algorithm, but it's not optimized, so we're actually spending time and having our teams go back and go, you know is, is this adding value? Could it be adding more value if we fix the title, the description, the, the actual transcript of the content from the video, itself, the thumbnail, all of that will be contributing. So I think people probably aren't taking it as seriously as they should. They want to get ahead of the curve in terms of like YouTube, LLM, discoverability, and to answer your point around your question, on Tiktok and Instagram, you know, it's been cited. They're cited as top search channels, but I don't think people also are yet thinking enough about how they optimize their content strategy, they should be looking at those keywords, those things they want to be discoverable for, and creating content around those keywords. I'll give you an example. We work with a lot of influencers in the b2b space. Every brief has the SEO strategy built into the brief. Not just we want you to create content on this topic for using this tool. It's also to meet an objective around search discoverability, and the LLMs are paying attention. I'm not an LLM expert, so I'm not going to pretend to be, but you know, we're spending a lot of time in this space. We're all learning at the same time as things evolve. And I think you know, the signals that are being sent from you know, the way people are engaging with your content on these channels is definitely being fed back. So it's not just about launching a product, pushing it out once, and going, Oh, I hope someone saw it and maybe they'll convert now it actually has much deeper meaning for how you think about your content strategy.

Dave Erickson 11:13
Businesses have traditionally been really bad at this, like they'll make a tutorial video about their product. And then the title of the video is, you know how to use the XYZ machine, and the description will be, here is a tutorial of how to use the XYZ machine. And that's really all the written content or searchable content that they have for the video, even though the video may go into how it's applied and how you use it, and all a lot of content and keywords, they don't even focus on it. Are you seeing people approaching it differently, or is that still a struggle with businesses, where they think that the video is just going to produce the content they don't need to do anything around it? You know?

Lisa Vecchio 11:58
I think we're on that journey now, and it's an educational piece. So if it's your like, your first forte into the space, or you're not paying attention to what's evolving here, you know, early entrants probably are doing this right? They probably are doing the best practice they need to. They're being told right away to make sure that it's timestamped and the full transcript is readable and blah, blah, blah, whereas maybe, if you're, you know with Legacy, or you've got someone in the team who's not an SEO, right? They're just a production person, just going tick, I've posted it, right? They might not know. So I think educate your team, spend time doing the research, make sure you're optimizing, not just for you know, publish doesn't mean impact, right? It goes a lot deeper than that.

Dave Erickson 12:40
Well, you mentioned something I think is also important and not talked about enough. And maybe you can talk a little bit about how you approach this issue, or how companies should approach this issue, and that is, they have in their head what they want to talk about, but that script, or that that concept isn't built around the actual keywords that are important to them. So it's kind of like they produce a video, and then afterwards they try to figure out what keywords fit it, versus figuring out what they want to search. Have you searched for and then writing content for it? What do you see in that, that area and how people are approaching that?

Lisa Vecchio 13:22
I think it's a mix. I think, of course, it's everything that you say. And I'll admit, you know, we'll put our hands up, you know, we might launch a new product, and we're like, Oh, get it out there. Everyone's talking about Nano Banana. So let's do a video on Nano Banana, because it's hot right now, and obviously people are googling it, so it works, but or searching for it in LLMs or wherever. And so I think there's a little bit of a mix. We've done some tests right, where we've actually seen when we do actually niche down, and it's like, more hyper focused than generic kind of hype, trendy stuff, we see, maybe, like, initially more views. But then when we actually track clicks through clicks and actually business impact, it's going to be the more niche stuff that actually is driving better return on investment in creating the resource. So my recommendation is everyone should take a keyword, first content strategy, first lens, and not just wing it if they expect certain outcomes from it. But hey, if you're just doing it for fun, do what you want.

Dave Erickson 14:25
right, right? Well, how

Lisa Vecchio 14:26
I'm just going to actually flip the question to you real quick. So when you do these, these episodes in these series, and assuming what you put on YouTube is that what you're doing,

Dave Erickson 14:35
Well, what I usually do is, is we try, I transcribe the video, and then I go through it and look for keywords and keyword themes, and then I build up a pretty significant keyword matrix, and then from that, I write the descriptions that fit that that trigger the keywords. I. Think are most important, or what people would most be searching for. I'll do some href searches to see what our top keyword searches that are so I can emphasize those, and then write the descriptions and the content based on that. We obviously do all the you know, we mark the timestamps and we write them out, also sticking keywords into the description. You know, it's a little bit of effort, but we have found that it just makes the searchability so much better. Yep, exactly. This is a little bit harder to plan, in a sense, the keywords. But if I was doing a product video, I would focus on, okay, what are the keywords and then kind of right, exactly around that right

Lisa Vecchio 15:47
Depends on, I think, your goals, you know, in this instance, you're looking for engaging conversations, you want to make sure it's something people are interested in and that they can find it, whereas some more, maybe business oriented, where you want to make sure that you're developing content specifically around the topics that relate back to your business. You'd likely start with that content mapping first

Dave Erickson 16:06
There's the video, and then, like, there's all the marketing around the video, right? And people, I think are not, they're seeing the video as the marketing, but as we just discussed, there's a lot you have to do. You have to find the keyword, you have to write the description. You have to do all the transcribing, and then, you know, laying out the video timestamps and all that. There's a, there's there's, like, I guess you would call it post production work, or pre production SEO work and marketing work, if you're gonna make a b2b, kind of video content using Veed. How would you go about the process of putting something together so you make, as you said, you make videos yourself. You use your own platform to do marketing videos for your own. What is kind of the workflow that you would go through using, say, Veed or any other AI video tool to put out something that is quality.

Lisa Vecchio 17:04
That's a great question. So I think I'd probably first start with like, what type of video you want to create. You know, we specialize in talking head videos on social, and there's a few different ways you could attack it, really. I think I like to think that you could really go from an idea all the way to a publishable video on this one platform. But, you know, we can, we can start with the question of, Do you already have a video that you've created that maybe you've recorded on your phone? Right? It might be more UGC style content that you want to go in and edit with, right? Versus, I actually want to create an avatar, or, you know, an AI talking character of myself and use that to do the intro of a webinar series I'm running. So I think we can first look at the different types of videos that you can create, and then how you go about creating them will be slightly different, two different paths, depending on if you have AI generated content at the start, or you have kind of human led film content that you want to edit, and then use AI editing tools to help you edit, you know, much more quickly and efficiently than you would probably, you know, without the kind of skill set you would need if you're not a trained editor.

Dave Erickson 18:09
Okay. Let's say we're doing a T- shirt business, print on demand, or, you know, whatever, and we sell T-shirts, and some of these T-shirts we sell to corporations. So we would need to make a b2b video promoting our T shirts and how our T shirts can be used for corporate events, and basically aim that video to a b2b clientele. So we would want to say, Okay, why we need to write some kind of a script? You can write scripts by hand. You can use chat to write a script and then improve it. I don't know, do they write scripts or help people with scripting?

Lisa Vecchio 18:54
Yep, there's scripting in there. So you can start with a script and go from basically a script to have that prompt generated video you can from that, let's say, upload an image, or generate an image that could have your product in it and or yourself using your headshot, or another, you know, photo that you wanted to use, or someone in your team or Business, let's say the CEO of this fictitious company holding the product or the t shirt. You know that you're that you're looking to market, and then you know you can have that run that script through, and have that generate that person talking about whatever that that topic is. On top of that, you likely probably want to add some B roll, so some contextual footage, so you can use AI to generate that contextual footage. Maybe the t shirt, you know, moves from the talking head of you holding it to a shot of the store or whatever, or someone trying it out, and you just see the back of them putting it on. And you know, with that, we have all of the latest video models, so you know that you would expect to see. So you're. Your, you know, Google videos and your open AI Soras, and like I might have mentioned, we have our own image to video talking head, proprietary model called Read Fabric. So all of that basically gets you the output that you would, you would want, you know, you can generate to re edit. And I think prompting is really important. It's an important skill that people need to learn, and you're not always going to get it right the first time. I think that's in the magic of learning how to build with AI. So really thinking about, I think going back to your question about the workflow before you even start making sure you understand what you're trying to achieve, I often suggest, like, even using GPT is to brainstorm ideate, iterate. Like, what, what should the flow be? What do you actually want one to do before you actually start prompting and inputting for that script direction? Or again, using GPTs to then input the script. You decide, once you have a video again, let's say you upload a video, or you've now generated one and generated some B roll with it that then goes on a timeline. And you know, if you're not a trained editor, you might not know what a timeline is, but it basically takes all your different individual pieces of film and puts it, you know, sequentially. You can move it around, etc. That's, I think, when the magic really happens at that point. Because to make a video, I think, of a certain quality, you're going to want to do a few things that like to call, like, add your pizza toppings, right? So you're going to want to add subtitles. Subtitles is, I mean better bread and butter, the accuracy of them, the different styles that we have and subtitles are super important for two reasons. One, accessibility and number two, you know, people often are watching content on social, on their phones with the sound off. I forget the number. You know, there's a percentage there that's like, a super, super high percentage of people watch content, like, while they're commuting, sitting on the couch, watching TV. It's passive consumption. Subtitles are so critical for that. Then there's the opportunity to add your other bells and whistles, like, you know, your music, or, you know, transitions are really cool. We talk about AI, you can actually prompt the transition. So I made a really cool video earlier this year where I was, it was a Halloween themed video, so this is a bit silly, but I prompted myself as like a vampire and then a zombie and then a ghost. And in between these three scenes, I actually said, like, make me fly into the next scene, or make me fall into the witch's brew, or I bounced out, and all of a sudden I came out sitting cross legged. And so these are just like little things that you can do to make the video more engaging. If you think about best practice, you typically have a hook, right? You typically have different scene makes up to keep the viewer engaged and kind of following along. And so AI transitions help you do that. I'm trying to think there's, I think, depending on the context. But in this case that you've got promotional video going on social, you probably do those bits and pieces. You then resize it for the social platforms to make sure that things that we call Safe Zones are all there, so you're not putting text that's being covered up by Facebook sizing and all that, and then you export it. And that's kind of where our workflow stops, so we don't have direct to publish platform or anything like that. But what's really cool is, I think some of these new like node based workflows that were workflow tools that we're starting to see out there, like the n8 ends of the world, the makes, the Zapiers, because we also have an API. And so we're seeing people actually create workflows where they're maybe like generating content copy in a spreadsheet, I missed so many steps, then having that auto record a voice, let's say, using 11 labs, dubbing that voice in certain languages, turning that into the talking head, using our Fabric API, and then automatically publishing now that's a very different workflow, but like you can see the two extremes between being an individual, maybe who's not super tech savvy, who, within five minutes, can script, generate, edit and execute a video, versus maybe someone who is a bit more tech savvy, who wants to do that at scale, can now use some of these actual workflow tools that allow them to kind of connect all the different tools and scenarios.

Dave Erickson 24:03
Yeah, I think you brought up a very interesting point, and that is, you know, platforms are no longer expected to be isolated, and in a sense, they're now expected to have APIs that integrate with automation and Make.com and Nan, you know, I can see really easily how you can automate a lot of video production in using an API to something like Veed to do a bunch of the pre production work, create the videos, do the distribution of videos. There's just a lot there. And I think companies that aren't making those API's and aren't integrating into automation really are missing the boat at this point.

Lisa Vecchio 24:53
I think gentic workflows, automation, it's the name of the game for 2026 for sure.

Dave Erickson 24:58
One of the mistakes I do see people make is they make an API for something, and then they say it's done, and they never look at that again. But as, as these tools evolve and as they get more powerful, you know, you need to adjust the API to encounter, you know, to deal with. Are you guys active in that? Are you guys working with these automation companies?

Lisa Vecchio 25:25
So, I mean, our, we have our own API, right? And so we have our own AI research team that's spending, you know, the majority of their time is, how do they make the lip sync even better? How they make the, you know, image to video generator even faster? How do we make longer videos that are AI generated, you know, it was first, what, couple seconds, then 15 seconds, and it was a minute. Now, we've got five minute long videos that we can, you know, automatically generate in this instance. So absolutely, we already have an API for image to video lip sync, background remover. Our lip sync API's been, you know, we're launching our new version of that, literally, on Tuesday next week. It's kind of in testing to finalize now. We're going to have Fabric 2.0 which is our proprietary talking head model, out in the next couple of months. And that's like, enhanced, right? Like enhanced emotional kind of facial gestures, hand movements, body movements, different angles. So, like, you know, I think with all this stuff, it's constant iteration and training. And, you know, the models are learning on themselves, and suddenly we're exploring things like even subtitle API's. It's our, like I said, it's our biggest, not only revenue generator from usage within the product, but it's kind of what we're known for. And we're actually seeing companies that are competitors to ours, companies that are in our safe space are integrating our Fabric image to video and lip sync API into their platforms. So there's some that are going live this week where alongside your Clings and your VOs and your Soras, you also have bead Fabric, which is really cool, because when you think about from a business opportunity standpoint, we're not just, you know, we're a PLG business, we're a sales assistant business, and now we're also an API business. So I think that diversification, where we are right now, with how you know things are moving so quickly, is really important.

Dave Erickson 27:15
You brought up something, it kind of changes the subject just a little bit. But I'd like to go there. Okay, we'll see you mentioned talking heads. And part of video content, or creating videos, is people are trying to connect in some of the original kind of AI generated, and I still see it AI generated videos where it's a, you know, you have a voice that was obviously AI generated, and they're using, you know, back images and stock footage and stuff to tell a story, although it accomplishes technically, the result, there is not much of a connection people being in a video. It creates connection headshots, especially, I think that AI headshots are important, and I think they're going to gain importance, but lately, they're not that realistic, or they tend to come across very unemotional, even though they're there, but that seems to be a specialty of Veed Where do you see AI headshots kind of going and evolving, and how should people use them in video creation?

Lisa Vecchio 28:28
Yeah, no, I think, I think it's a big topic, because I think there's a maturity curve when it comes to generated AI content that we're still on the early kind of curve on right, both from a quality standpoint and from a sentiment standpoint of kind of what people want and expect from their social feeds. But I do have strong conviction that we're going to reach, like, a mature point on that curve sooner rather than later. So like I have high conviction that there is a time and a place and a need. I think the quality is only improving every single day. I also very strongly agree in real people and human connection and making sure that I think we're smart about how and when we use this stuff for the right use cases. And I think there are some legitimate use cases out there where, you know, we can see small business owners, people who don't have a lot of resources, who don't necessarily have the skill sets, who might not know how to go about how do I get influencers to start to promote my brand? But I'm hearing that's the thing that we're doing in b2b now, where actually they can, you know, create an entire Instagram page with generated content. Now, you could argue people think that's ethical, or, you know, what have you, but you know, it is a means to an end for people to tell their story if it's done well, I think we talked about prompting and education curves. Part of that is like, if you’re producing slop at scale because you're lazy and you're just pressing a button and getting it out there, and then that's like flooding our feeds and people are exhausted because they're like, this is just bad. You know, I think you've got a responsibility as a content creator, whether you're trained content creator, or you're a small business owner or you're a marketing manager, just trying to hit your deadlines. You know, these are all real situations that you've got to kind of hold yourself accountable for a certain quality bar and take, you know, like you like, we're all learning to code with code with Claude at the moment, like it's we all have to put the reps in to get, kind of get better at it. So I think it's a fine line. Like I on a personal level, I don't want to see my feed with only AI generated content. An example we have, though, is we have a lot of content creators in house that, you know, are employed by us, that work with us, and we had, like, a turnover recently, right, where we're in the process of hiring new creators, and we have to produce a high volume of ads that need to, you know, help us achieve our conversion goals, right? And, you know, our team got so good at prompting these talking head UGC style creatives that were actually running them as our entire paid campaigns, because the algorithms are demanding it to a degree. You know, you've got, what is it? It's Meta Andromedas algorithm now that's just constantly pushing for more creative variations, and to do that as a team, you know, in a traditional sense, where you've got to spend all this money and hire agencies and blah, blah, blah, it's just not realistic anymore. So I've gone all a little all over the map, but I think, I think there's a time and place for I think the quality is only gonna get better. I think that people have to take, that people have to take accountability, though, for what they put out there. And I think the fatigue, we're probably going to see an end to it as it just becomes more of a norm sooner rather than later. But I think we're definitely in this moment now where everyone's going, please, be authentic, be human. I'm tired. I think that's also just like the general nature of everyone being tired because it's information overload. We're all learning so fast, so much, it's exhausting. So I think once it just becomes the norm, we're just going to kind of get on with it and accept it .I don't know. I don't know like i i believe it because I'm saying it because I believe it. But it's weird.

Dave Erickson 32:18
My joke is, is that doing AI right takes a lot of work, and most people think that AI is supposed to save them from doing work. But the reality is, there's a lot of work that needs to go into making AI work well, and if you do that, then maybe you can see the productivity gains. But if you're just going to be lazy and type in a, you know, a one sentence prompt, yeah, you're not going to. And the unfortunate thing is, you know, the, the algorithms are demanding more content. People are dealing with that by making prompts that are very simple because they don't have time or to keep doing it. And so they're just generating kind of, really, as you say, AI slop. There's a lot of it flowing right now, and I don't know how much of an impact that's going to have overall. I do think you're right though, that things move around. And right now we're in the age of AI slop, as people figure it out, you're going to see a lot of it, and it's going to turn some people off, but then it's also going to mature, and people will say, Okay, this is good, and I got something from it, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Lisa Vecchio 33:31
if it's so good you don't even someone said to me the other day. They were like, Oh, I think this next generation as well. I think they said, Oh, my kid’s 12. And every time I take a picture of something, like, I'm really proud of, and I show them, they go, Oh, Mom, no, that's AI. And, like, No, really? Like, I baked this cake, and that was just because it's someone there's the other extreme where, if it looks that good, they think it's AI as well. So I think it's a weird time. I think if it's achieving a purpose, if it's safe, if if it's, you know, helping achieve your your goal that you set out there, then you know, we should not be discouraging it just because it's different and it's a bit controversial and blah, blah, blah, but yeah, we still have a ways to go. I definitely think we still have a ways to go. But the more we can experiment and learn from our mistakes as well, like you're never going to get it right in the first prompt.

Dave Erickson 34:22
It's a an extension of the natural creative process, right? You try something, you figure it out, you get good at it, then it's like, well, how can I do something different? And then you start experimenting with something else, and you combine it together. And just as long as the AI tools allow for people to have that input, right? Then, obviously, there are people who are just generally lazy, and they don't want that, and they want to make as little effort as possible. And the AI tools can help you do something like that, but the output, I think, gets a little boring after a while, right? So. Now I'm seeing, when I go look up something on YouTube, I mean, you can just see half of the, the images for people's videos. It's obviously AI generated, and they're all kind of the same, and the art looks the same, and then you got the other half who are doing it themselves, and that looks different. And I think, you know, eventually people are going to say, Okay, we prefer the more natural style versus the AI style, right? But I've also seen some AI stuff where I couldn't tell if it was AI or faked, right? And, yeah, that's a little nervous. It makes me a little bit nervous, but on the other hand, it also makes me think, okay, there are people who really understand the technology, and I think that comes back to things like headshots, right? I think that there is a very good use for headshots that, you know, some people are like, I'm camera shy. I don't work well in front of a camera. They can use an AI headshot to take one of themselves and reproduce themselves, but do it in a way where they're smooth and not, not a result they could get if they did it on camera themselves. So I think that has a benefit. And there are also people who don't necessarily want to be public and have their face known to people. So they want something that isn't but they want to convey a message, and I think that those are valid uses as well, right? As long as you’re not trying to deceive anyone with that, it should be fine.

Lisa Vecchio 36:29
No, I think I was talking to some social leads at an event I had the other day, and, you know, they're like, you know, I'm happy for the company to use my AI generated talking head for promo stuff, but when I leave the company, I want that IP to come with me as well, right? I don't want them to keep using my face and my voice, let's say when I'm no longer here. But we talk about like, you know, CEOs, sometimes it's hard to get them on camera. It's hard to get them to deliver that message to the company for the campaign launch or whatever. I'm not talking about delivering your all hands. That would feel a little bit like disconnected and but it's like, yeah, we can generate that and have it kind of make sure that we're able to share the message, or we talk about the use case of, you know, you're opening lines before you deliver a webinar or a podcast or sales people, right? Like they're delivering video messages in their outreach on LinkedIn. And you know, they can create a highly personalized video that they can just edit a couple words, you know, have that re-record, Hi Dave, Hi Lisa, Hi Joe. But it's the same sort of content in one or two clicks. And that helps talk about automation and workflows, then scale, scale their outreach. So I think there's the, the generation stuff is, yeah, there's a time and a place for it. The quality certainly is getting better. I think, like, you know, the backlash around the Coca Cola commercial, you can kind of go, like, Everyone's upset because it was AI generated like that. You just read the comment section. It's really interesting. But like, also, why do you care? Like, there's a little bit of like, Coke was telling a story, and who cares if they used AI to tell it and the polar bears were fake polar bears. Like, does it actually change the fact that you want to drink a coke or not? Like, it's, I think we're taking it too seriously in some regards. Like, it's a commercial.

Dave Erickson 38:15
They've had that for years. I mean, there's plenty of movies where the dog starts. Yeah, right, so I don't think there's much there. And I think from a marketing standpoint, it could have a use. Because, you know, I think part of the future of, say, email is going to be having a short embedded video, and if you had a headshot of a person, I would assume, basically, using the technology that you've been talking about, that person could introduce himself, Hi John, Hi Bob, whoever the email is targeted to, they could actually have a personal message to that person, because, you know, they have the name for the email, and they just sync it in and generate a little AI snippet for that headshot, and that could have some actual impact in email marketing, which is something that a lot of people are spending a lot of money on and and need to get impact or value for their dollar. And I think that that's not disingenuous, it just makes it more realistic or more connected, correct?

Lisa Vecchio 39:21
Yeah, personalization, it's been trending for years too, right? So it's just another way to reach people. Yeah.

Dave Erickson 39:26
If somebody wanted to make a headshot video that's 30 minutes long, that's really difficult to do. Is that correct?

Lisa Vecchio 39:35
Yeah, today, today?

Dave Erickson 39:36
Yeah, what it what are those kind of limits? And do you know what, what they are?

Lisa Vecchio 39:42
Um, so I know with our model, it's up to five minutes now, and that's one of the, kind of the longest ones out there. I mean, even if I think Bo is still like, I don't want to be misquoted, like, 30 seconds or a minute or something like that. So, you know, there are workarounds now, like again. These automation workflows where you can create different scenes, and it's all about continuity between the scenes, and you connect them all. That's kind of how you get your 30 minute video. And so, you know, if I were to create something for social and I would want to record, like, my talking head with some movement, and then, like I said, maybe some B roll or a transition into a different scene in a different environment. It's just about stitching those things together on the timeline and then making sure you're exporting it, you know, in one export. So just a little bit more time intensive, but not impossible. I think. You know, our tool isn't intended for super long form. It's intended for short form on social and so people also use it to click long form to then get, you know the best bits to then edit to put on social. Whether I think they'll probably, there. There are, you know, probably other tools out there that if you're into filmmaking or something that requires longer scenes and sequences are better suited

Dave Erickson 40:58
For, say, b2b videos, are there some trends that you're seeing? I mean, I assume, since you're able to see kind of how the users are using Veed tools to create stuff, do you are you able to see kind of some trends of how people are using video in b2b or using your tool in b2b video creation,

Lisa Vecchio 41:26
We can see things like usage of certain parts of our tool set that get more usage than other features, let's say so what's interesting is like, we obviously going back to like, the search LLM conversation is we, we obviously monitor the keywords and what's trending around, what people want, right and expect, and we actually built our business on keyword search to begin with. So if people were saying, I need a video compressor tool, we would build the video compressor tool to, like, drive traffic to our website. And that's actually how we got some of our initial growth. That's not the name of the game anymore, but what we can see is actually traditional editing tools, like, I need a video editor. Those search terms are actually on decline, where we're actually seeing I need an AI video generator, and keywords like that are on their way up. So we are seeing a shift from a need of people just needing I have a video and I want to edit it, to more people saying I actually want to generate something. So that's kind of like one trend we're seeing, without a doubt, our subtitles, like I say, are probably our most used feature. People come to us exclusively for subtitling. Translation is another big one. So you know you can translate. And then also you have the dubbing in multiple different languages with, with lip sync. That's that's important, even if it's not AI generated, right, if it's just yourself as a talking head. The other two big ones are background remover, so people, and that's why we have an API for that feature, and eye contact correction. So I like eye contact correction because when I think about businesses who want to employee advocacy is really big, in b2b, right, businesses want to leverage their employees, because people listen to people more than they listen to brands. And one of the things I like to talk about is, like, how some of these AI editing tools can really be used to upskill people in your teams, right, who might not be like you mentioned, like confident on camera, or a lot of reasons people within organizations don't post content because they're not sure, like, if it's on brand or if it's allowed. So you know, what people are using are, like, they're building brand kits right within the b2b situation, so that the logo and the fonts and the 'This' and ‘thats’ are all pre approved. You teach your teams how to correct your eyes, add your subtitles, resize it for social and all of a sudden, like, maybe an average video just became a much better video by just kind of leveling up the quality. Oh, that's the other one, noise, background remover. Like, you get a lot of people, especially sales people, I think, or Yeah, I do it as well. Like, on the go, you're recording a video, and you're on the street, so it clears that up. So those are kind of, like, feature trends and an overall shift that we're seeing of more AI generation, AI editing needs over traditional video editing needs, which is, like, where we started, that is, like proven in numbers. I think, like when it comes to content on social. I mean, there's loads of trends, so I can't speak to what the latest thing trending on Tiktok is, but we are seeing, obviously, like founder content is super big and important right now. So ensuring that you're leveraging founder voices, employee voices, specifically on LinkedIn for b2b, turning those into thought leadership ads is another kind of really important thing to be thinking about. We're seeing on Instagram like trending series. So not just like, pushing out content and features or people talking about whatever your theme is, but actually creating an entire series around it, which is getting people to come back, to follow along, to maybe even save and share, and that's kind of feeding the algorithm. Those are just kind of Top of Mind.

Dave Erickson 45:09
Also, I don't know, but I assume a lot of the videos that people are making on the b2b space are tutorial videos, videos on how to use product. Are, Are there, you know, you mentioned that you make a lot of those type of videos yourself, introducing your features and other things, if somebody wanted to make such videos, are there tips that you have for them on how to do it well and how they could use Veed to do that?

Lisa Vecchio 45:38
Yeah, I mean, we have a screen recorder as well. So you can, you know, literally, combine maybe an intro from yourself or with your avatar. Another fun thing you could consider is, like, if you have a, this is maybe not well, it is like, I think about monday.com, and companies like that who have these mascots, right? And like, you can actually make your mascot talk now. So I think going back to like b2b doesn't have to be boring, and maybe even your product demos and tutorials don't have to be boring. Now, like you can think of really out of the box ways where you can introduce some of these things, but you certainly can record yourself. You can record some sort of talking image to do your introductions. You can share your screen to basically zoom in, zoom out, kind of share the product tutorials that you need, and then, like I said, button it up with your kind of pizza toppings to make it fit for purpose. Again. Translations, dubbing, subtitles. These are all the kind of must haves that you should still be putting on even a product explainer video.

Dave Erickson 46:37
Well, I think that, that you brought up an important part, and that is localization. And as you know, the world expands, and as people are doing business in different places, I think people are forgetting that there are other languages besides English or the language they're publishing in, and there's now, I mean, obviously AI can do the translation, and it's getting more and more accurate. Do you see a lot of people doing localization and translation on Veed, or is it still focused on one language?

Lisa Vecchio 47:09
No, no, we have 125 languages supported all of our, we partner with 11 Labs as well for a lot of the kind of the voices and the localization aspect of that, definitely in b2b, definitely in our enterprise sector, for sure that there's a huge need for the dubbing. So yeah, a lot of people, especially, let's say people, want to communicate in their native language. But also a lot of businesses tend to be English first. So we're seeing that they're kind of duplicating, you know, localized content with, kind of meeting that global need of, like, English first content, depending on, I'm thinking specifically, if it's shared on social. So we have the localization, we have the dubbing, and yeah, we're also seeing in, yeah, in probably larger businesses and company sizes, they're the ones that I think are taking most advantage of these features.

Dave Erickson 48:09
Solopreneurs and entrepreneurs don't need as many people resources to do as much. And one of the things I've seen is I see a lot of AI tools that are very focused on that. But also enterprise is still a big part, and enterprise itself is also trying to figure out, how do they use AI tools to improve productivity or to do more or to do things they didn't used to do? Are you playing in both ends of that market? What is your focus?

Lisa Vecchio 48:43
Yeah, so I think this kind of prosumer, solopreneur small business, that's where probably about not 80, 90% of our revenue is, is coming from. And I think it's interesting because, you know, you think of a creator, they're technically a small business owner. You think about, you know, someone who owns a mom and pop shop, and they're the ones, like you said, you really have this need, like, right? Like, they're not necessarily deep experts in all the different channel mixes. They're price conscious. They want to be able to scale quickly, and they want to be able to get their message across. So they need tools to do that, right? And video and social is one way where we see a lot of success there, the tutorials, the product videos, YouTube, blah, blah, blah. On the enterprise side, yeah, I think probably are. We're seeing a lot of marketing teams adopt where you probably have what we're calling like this modern marketing generalist, right as teams are downsizing, you've got people coming into the business, or people as their teammates are kind of, unfortunately, being let go, who are being asked to be this jack of all trades, so all of a sudden that you might not have a video team anymore, and your generalist is the social media manager and the email marketing manager and the copywriter and etc, and those are where we're seeing most, yeah, most common sort of use case in bigger. Bigger marketing teams and marketing organizations. We have a few other use cases, which is, I think is interesting, like and this goes back to again, freeing people up to give them more, more opportunity to impact them. So we work with LinkedIn and their editorial team. So these are people who are journalists, who create content and publish it as LinkedIn news on linkedins platform. So technically, it's a marketing job in the same sense, if they weren't that the organization that they are, and they used to have loads of editors who they would have to record clips, send it out to get produced, come back, maybe ship it next week. And they've kind of built that branded, safe environment where they've been trained to basically press these four buttons, do these four things, and now all of a sudden, you know your your video is approved, and now you can go push it out so different, not that marketing generalist, but still not necessarily using the same team that they had before to achieve the same goal. It's an interesting time. It's not just in video and social content that people are asked to be doing more, and we're all learning new skills across a variety of different spectrums. This is just one example.

Dave Erickson 51:10
Like I said, AI takes a lot of work. (I'm tired. Are you tired?) You know, I'm seeing more and more, like websites where you land on the website, and it's a headshot of basically a person, a founder, somebody saying, Hey, welcome to our web store. Welcome to our website. This is what you can find, please. You know, a short introduction. Is that stuff that you're seeing being done on Veed at this point? Or is that how Veed is being used? Or Is Veed really being used? As, as containered content that goes out on social media?

Lisa Vecchio 51:48
I think the primary use case is these talking heads on social media. Yeah, so you know you're calling headshot worth calling, like image to video. Same thing where, you know you can upload an image of a head. It could be human, it could be a dog. It could be your mascot. It could be something that, you know, I like the 80s version of Lisa that I generated in Nano Banana. Could be any of those things. And we have the image Gen tools like, like the Nano Bananas of the world in our tools as well. So you can start with what you upload and adapt it to make it work for you. I think we're seeing the use case primarily on social media, but those videos, as you said, can be embedded anywhere. They're embedded at the start of a webinar, at the start of a training video on a website. Hello. Nice to meet you. Paige, so I think if it's short content with a talking head, it's the right fit for beads use case, it's just that things are shared on social at much higher volumes and much higher pace, which is why that's where the majority of it we see.

Dave Erickson 52:47
You mentioned 11 Labs and several others. It seems like your tool integrates a bunch of stuff as well, and it sounds like Veed is almost like a video editing studio. Is that correct?

Lisa Vecchio 53:02
We prefer to call ourselves a video creation platform, because you really can go from generating, or like an idea, all the way through to editing. So we started out as an editor, but now with the generation, you know, in there as well, and all the tools, like I mentioned, Google, Sora, Kling, you know, there's, there's loads of them. We like, think we're more than just an editing tool, right? Because some, if you think about the competitive space, there are tools that are just generative, and then you've got to go somewhere else to edit it. It's probably one of the few places you can actually generate and edit in one workflow.

Dave Erickson 53:36
So you could basically take original content that you filmed, combine it with content such as a headshot or stuff you're generating within Veed, and then put it all together in Veed and have a final video Correct? (You got it. You got it Yeah. And you can also kind of do some of the ideation and script writing as well,

Lisa Vecchio 53:58
and the image generation and all of that, but then you then turn into video. And as I mentioned, B roll, so, you know, you want to prompt, you know, girl running through a forest, because that's going to give context to whatever the story is you're telling with your, with your talking head, you know, that's in there as well.

Dave Erickson 54:13
Great, great. Where do you thinkAI video generation is going in the next, you know, five to 10 years? Where do you see AI video generation leading to?

Lisa Vecchio 54:28
It's a huge question. I don't own the company. I don't want to speak for anyone else's vision for where we're going. I also think 5 to 10 years is a huge horizon, like the pace of, like, what we've achieved when I've been with this company for, let's say, a year and a quarter. When I joined this company, we were predominantly an editing company with some AI editing features. And very, very quickly we become an AI generation company, right? Because that's how fast the market's moving. So really, really difficult to know. I think one thing is, you know. The cost of these things is all going to be commoditized. You know, right now, we're in a world of credits, where people it's all a little bit confusing. People are not really sure, is it a subscription? Like, how are they being and not just in the video space, you think about building on lovable or any of these other things everyone's trying to figure out, like consumption versus subscription based, and how that's gonna work. So that's like, one thing I'm thinking about that's gonna look different. It's probably just going to be like, no big deal, you know, to kind of create something, and it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg or whatever. I think, yeah, I think the quality you could ask this question to like, where is AI going? Where is chat GPT going? Where is Anthropic going? I'm really, really curious. I'm not probably technical enough to speak to quantums and things that probably people know about that I don't know about. So I'll just keep it simple and say I think the quality is going to be like something we've never imagined before. I think it's going to change the way we do engage on social for sure. I am curious about the future of these platforms for sure. But, you know, I think, if anything, the way that YouTube is feeding LLMs And Google owning Gemini and owning YouTube like there's just a lot to kind of speculate around.

Dave Erickson 56:17
In a sense, it's almost becoming a whole media vertical, right? People are going to have to look at being. Well, that kind of brings us a little bit to Veed. Do you want to talk a little bit about Veed and who or what your client base would be like, and how do you see Veed fitting into people's marketing?

Lisa Vecchio 56:40
Well, I felt like we spoke about Veed loads. I just want to make sure that people get value. I don't need to be here extra plugging apart from what we've already, we've already done. I mean, I think if you're a business owner, you're a marketer, you need to create video for your business goals. You know, you should be thinking about it. Veed’s mission is to make video creation accessible to everyone. So it really is for, you know, all of us who are struggling with all the jobs that have to be done and we want to get it done, you know, better, faster, you know, and with a good quality. That's kind of what our focus is. Definitely not just an editor. We talked a lot about generation. Definitely think if you haven't started experimenting, I'd say, just start experimenting. If you're not posting video content, just start by starting. A lot of times we say, just start by pressing record. Like, don't worry about getting the full script right. Just start talking about what you want to talk about, and then the tool makes it easy for you to strip it all back, you know, get your finished product. I think that's kind of really, really all I want to say is, yeah, I'm encouraging with my own experimentation with AI and doing more video myself, is, like, that's probably the biggest thing is you've just got to, just got to start. Because I think probably for most people, or most people I speak to, unless you're a social media lead or a business owner who's got it all figured out, a lot of people still are skeptical or unsure how to take that first leap right, like I did a survey at the end of last year, and the the outtake was like 98% of those that we surveyed, who were marketers in the UK, in the US, were certain that video would be part of their strategy. They know they needed to do it, but only I think, like 38% were confident that they could do it themselves, and so there's this huge confidence gap out there that I think as a marketer, marketing for this video business, that's what I'm here to help solve for is to help educate people on how to actually get it done. Not be intimidated, just pull the trigger and get going.

Dave Erickson 58:37
Great, great. Lisa, thank you so much for being on our podcast and discussing how AI is transforming business video production. Well, we are at the end of the episode today, but before you go, we want you to think about this important question: how will you use video to increase your marketing effectiveness? For our listeners, please subscribe and click the notifications to join us for our next screambox technology and business rundown podcast, and until then, try using AI to make some videos.

Dave Erickson 59:10
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast, and please let us know any subjects or topics you would like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM till next month, please stay happy and healthy.