Three weeks ago we held our 6th annual SmartVideo Summit in Brooklyn, a day where customers, prospects and partners all come together to learn from each other and share their experiences, challenges, best practices and case studies on all things personalization, video storytelling and the intersection of the two for customer-obsessed advertising and marketing.
We were honored to have SundaySky customers from Cox Communications, Bank of America, UnitedHealthcare, Expedia and Playbuzz all onstage expressing their commitments to personalized customer engagement through transformational video.
Transformation was this year’s theme and the recurring topic for the morning keynote presentations (which were visually captured in real time during the morning on a life-size mural, pictured above). Discussions focused on:
Mark Lawson, VP of Digital Marketing & Sales at Cox Communications, shared his perspective and insights on what digital transformation looks like for the cable provider, and why the brand’s growth strategy has transformed from net new accounts adds to customer retention and loyalty. Mark discussed how the brand’s focus on frictionless customer journeys resulted in customer retention and satisfaction while driving business efficiencies, such as lower costs to serve. Of six core customer journeys that Mark mapped out, Cox partners with SundaySky to support half of those journeys with personalized video engagement, and includes the SmartVideo Marketing Cloud in it’s e-commerce ecosystem tech stack.
With the release of the next generation of the SmartVideo Marketing Cloud also came the introduction of our newest baby, the SmartVideo Studio. During the morning’s product keynote, Guy Atzmon, SVP of Creative & Industry Solutions, accompanied by Megan Weil, Director of Product Management, demonstrated how we are simplifying SmartVideo; they built scenes, modified stories, deployed videos and measured various programs. But it didn’t end there…
The duo actually created and sent a personalized SmartVideo for everyone in the audience, live in real time. The story of the video was to help make decisions at the Summit for each of the 200+ members in the audience, such as a recommended fellow attendee to meet and network with, the optimal afternoon breakout track to attend based on the topic the attendee was most interested in learning about, a recommended restaurant in the area based on his or her favorite cuisine, and the guest’s departing flight time and status (of course, only applicable if the guest was indeed flying out of NYC that day.) Nothing like personalized video storytelling in real time!
Attendees watch their personalized video at SmartVideo Summit 2018:
After the product keynote on the mainstage, attendees were ready for a hands-on, deep dive into the SmartVideo Studio, and signed up for one-one-one demos with experts at the Product Lab for a look at how to build and modify video scenes, stories and logic; how to reviewing existing scene library content, manage programs and see side-by-side how data drives video personalization; and look at all the metrics that matter in their video analytics intelligence toolkit across both paid media and owned media programs.
At last year’s fifth annual Summit, we introduced the inaugural SmartVideo Vanguard awards dedicated to honoring the innovative brands, advertisers and marketers paving the path with personalized video and achieving phenomenal success with SmartVideo. Once again, we celebrated customers in five different categories, each focused on pushing the boundaries in terms of data, creative, performance, personnel and strategy.
Here are the 2018 SmartVideo Vanguard Award winners:
