Artificial Intelligence is no longer a new topic, but it’s still a hot one, given the fast development and the impact it has in most professional areas. Video marketing makes no exception, with new trends and tools appearing every month and new technologies pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. The discussion over the past years has veered a lot towards the possibility of AI replacing human creativity.
However, we believe that the reality here is one of enhancing, not replacing, and we believe that every tool that can enhance human creativity and productivity is worth considering and using, if it proves beneficial to the creation process. That is why we constantly challenge ourselves to test a lot of the new tools that arrive on the market and incorporate those that can make a difference in our workflow and in the value we can provide to our clients.
In this article, we will go over a few of the ways in which AI can enhance and can be integrated into the video marketing creation and production process.
Before we begin, though, we need to briefly explain what AI is, to be able to understand how it influences marketing in the broader sense and video marketing more specifically. Artificial Intelligence refers to computer systems which, through the use of powerful software algorithms and machine learning technologies, are able to analyze and synthesize enormous quantities of information, automate processes, and sometimes perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence and labor.
AI can be useful, to different degrees, at almost every stage of the video marketing process. If, for example, you are a veterinary clinic and you want to celebrate the “International Furry Friends Day” with a nice video, then AI can help you create a one-of-a-kind product fast and from scratch. With the right prompts, it can give you ideas for concepts, create scripts based on these concepts, help you find appropriate stock footage and music, can give you editing suggestions, create titles and graphics etc.
For more complex project, however, AI might not be able to perform all of these tasks at a high level of quality, which is why we need to know when it’s appropriate to use it.
We will go through each of the stages of video marketing creation and production and highlight what types of tools can be of help and in which situations.
Strategy and concept
Everything starts with strategy, which is at the heart of each of the video products that we’ve offered to our clients over the years. We are very fond of the brainstorming process and create strategies and concepts tailored specifically to our clients’ business goals. However, from time to time we test new ideation tools to see what they have to offer. We’ve worked with multiple solutions, from the most common ones, like ChatGPT, to the more sophisticated ones, and while we did sometimes get interesting results, we find that the output of such tools is too generic for the level of subtlety that we aim to offer to our clients.
An area linked with strategy where AI can be of great help is the analysis of consumer behavior. Machine learning software can go over massive volumes of raw data and give us clear, easy to understand insights into what customers want, so we can create strategies specifically for those categories of consumers.
Preproduction
Scripting
Script drafting is the next step after setting up the concepts and key messages of the video marketing campaign. As we’ve mentioned above for video concepts and strategies, we always create original scripts based on the specific goals our clients are aiming for and the specifics of their customer audiences. But AI can be useful in generating scripts for quick social media videos, even though a lot of the scripts generated by AI tend to sound the same, after a while.
Another use, especially if you’re just starting out with scripting, is to use these tools as a way to see how a story looks like written in script format, what elements need to be included (like characters and screen direction and so on).
Storyboarding
This is the stage that usually follows scripting, where you take your written script and turn it into visuals. Each scene in the video is broken down into shots and each shot is sketched out to set up framing, set design and so on. Until now, this was done by trained storyboard artists. Now, AI tools can create storyboards in different styles, which are good enough for most uses and cost very little to generate. We enjoy regularly putting our scripts through such pieces of software to visualize them, even if not all of these storyboards are seen by the clients.
Most times, it’s just so we get ideas for framing, set design and so on. When projects require a certain degree of artistry or when a certain style is needed, we hire storyboard artists that deliver original designs.
Production
The production phase is when you literally film your content. This is one of the most human and personal parts of the process, where people are usually in the spotlight and where, as a result, AI can’t substantially help. But even here, some AI tools can be used for things like new shot ideas on the fly or generating LED screen backgrounds.
Post-production
Post-production is what is more commonly described as “editing”, although the post-production process is much more complex and includes many more stages than just editing. This is one of the most dynamic areas of AI development, with many tools developed for editing, color correction or graphics.
Personally, we often use AI for voice enhancement for interviews and it has been such a game changer and time saver for our workflow that we can’t really see the possibility of going back to the way things were done before. We also use AI for temporary voice overs, until a voice over artist has been hired or the client has approved the final version of the voice over recording. This way, we can offer clients edit drafts with professional sounding voice over.
Other tools help with automating tasks, which speed up the post-production process. This includes color balancing and matching and auto editing based on speech. We’ve tested all of these latter tools and stay constantly up to date with them, but we still prefer to edit in the conventional way, because the productions we’ve done until now require a fine and intentional style of editing, in tune with the content and the emotions it’s trying to evoke in the viewer. Also, we often experiment with our color grading to enhance the style of the videos we produce. But if you’re creating podcasts or a lot of multicam productions, these tools can considerably speed up your workflow.
Distribution
In the old days, commercial videos were mainly designed for television, and the specifications for that content was pretty straightforward. Now, one of the first questions we ask our clients during our first meetings is “What platforms would you like to publish your content to?”. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok etc. all have specific video requirements in terms of video length, frame size, bitrate, how graphics are displayed etc.
For example, we use AI software to analyze our edits and see which ones would perform better on social media, and make the necessary cuts to have the best performing videos for each platform. Also, other AI tools help us reframe shots for TikTok and Instagram (only in the rare cases where they were not shot specifically for these platforms and distribution to these channels has been decided later), add subtitles and other graphics, and optimize videos attributes for distribution.
Also in the distribution phase, AI tools can help with generating SEO keyworks, copy for the video descriptions, or transcriptions for auto subtitles.
Analytics
Going back to the beginning, once the video campaigns have been publishd and the viewer data has been collected, AI tools can analyze video performance, see which ones did better, why, what moments or shots were most impactful, if the choice of music had an influence on performance and so on. This can help us as an agency and our clients to fine tune future campaigns for even better success.
AI is a great help in the video marketing process, as we’ve clearly seen in this article, but what we need to remember is that these tools are not designed to do everything for us. They have their place in the process and can help enhance our creativity, but at the end of the day video is a very emotional and human type of content, and the key messages, stories, and visuals need to have the human touch if we want them to be most efficient.
As a video marketing agency, we look at the areas that AI can enhance, speed up, and make more efficient, but we will never use it as a replacement for true creativity.
