4 Things You Missed at the 6th Annual SmartVideo Summit

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.

Here is a quick recap of the top highlights you missed at this year’s Summit:

#1: Video transformation is the new black.

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:

• Content atomization and modularity transforming video strategies moving forward,
• Digital transformation strategies and customer journeys built on video storytelling, and
• Existing digital channels and points of engagement that are being transformed with SmartVideo.

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.  

#2: Personalized videos built and sent live from the stage to the entire audience.

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:

#3: The inaugural Product Lab where guests experienced our new SmartVideo Studio for themselves.

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.

#4. Five customers won Vanguard Awards for achieving excellence with SmartVideo.

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:

1. Best Creative Execution to American Express for their Platinum Card welcome program that tightly reflected the card’s re-branding, one of the most important initiatives of their year, and drove some of the highest viewer engagement metrics SundaySky has seen with any customer onboarding experience in across all industry verticals.
2. Best Use of Data to Bank of America for their Preferred Rewards program for building a unified dataset from multiple siloed data sources that ultimately delivered a highly personalized story and relevant message to the Bank’s premium audience.
3. SmartVideo MVP to Citibank’s Lizette Bonito for serving as the single point of accountability within the digital marketing team, coordinating all functions across program development, management and optimization. Lizette’s focus, dedication and expertise around the development of SmartVideo allows Citi to deliver incredible results from their portfolio of more than 10 programs from one of the most extensive SmartVideo content libraries to date.
4. Most Significant ROI to Cox Communications for an omnichannel personalized video advertising program on programmatic and Facebook that consistently outperforms its target goals. “SundaySky’s SmartVideo is delivering better results than anything we’ve tried in the past with video on Facebook. In fact, this personalized video program is outperforming all of Cox’s other Facebook tactics in regards to cost per acquisition. We are seeing results almost 200% better than what we set out to achieve while maintaining a scale that is meaningful to our business in order to reach our customers where they are spending more and more time,” said Todd Campbell, senior manager of digital media at Cox Communications. (Download the full case study here.)
5. Most Strategic Use of SmartVideo to UnitedHealthcare for making personalized onboarding and claims videos a centerpiece of the MyUHC experience for eligible members. Health insurance is one of the most difficult topics for consumers to understand due to the complexity of plan types, coverage options, and various cost line-items, but UHC is driving an improved experience for their members, who appreciate it and find extremely helpful.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Need more? Watch the video highlights below from SmartVideo Summit in Brooklyn: