As B2B marketing professionals have started trying out digital videos to reach their customers, a few startups have started partnering with them to help them in their pursuit. Headquartered in Tokyo, Videogram helps people discover, engage, and share their favorite videos by providing, at a glance, all the important scenes from those videos. Videogram is patented worldwide.

Co-Founder of Videogram, Rahul Golecha talked to Digital CMO Digest about how marketers can use videos as a tool to reach their customers.

 Interviewed by Avanish Tiwary

/ / How has video marketing evolved?

At a time when click bait stuff has become prevalent, finding the right video is important and there is no innovation around that.

What Videogram does is, rather than just showing the whole video it also splits the video into multiple scenes. We show those split scenes in an interactive collage form. The small clips give the viewer a summary of the whole video, after which they can decide if that’s the video they wish to watch.

In many cases, viewers just want to watch a particular section of the video and it's usually difficult to find that in the whole video. But when we break a video into collage form, viewers know which clip consists of what scenes and start the video from that point on. It helps viewers save time and bandwidth both.

It helps publishers as well. A lot of times when a movie trailer comes out, people create copies of either the trailer or just the poster and share the same thing with a different video embedded in it and when users click on it they realize it's the wrong video. That affects the publisher’s original videos and creates negative sentiment in the minds of viewers.

/ / So it’s a B2B2C model?

Publishers are using it but eventually, the interface is going down to the consumer level. Our split video feature with multiple thumbnails of the same video is a new tool for publishers because one of the thumbnails could display an advertisement or a tie-up with some brand. So even if people are not clicking on the video, we are making money out of the display ad without increasing the real estate.

/ / Since we are showing multiple thumbnails and frames, the click rate increases as someone might be interested in one of those multiple frames.

There is a frame of Shahrukh Khan and another of Katrina Kaif; one group of people will click on Khan’s thumbnail and the other set on Kaif’s thumbnail video clip. The existing revenue on these networks also increases.

/ / How are companies looking at exploiting videos as a content marketing tool?

A lot of companies are using video marketing to promote their products. Videos are something that drives traction and keeps the user engaged for a certain amount of time. It’s a new trend in the market and a lot of companies don’t know how to make the most out of it. At times, they create a whole stack of videos and then slowly figure out how those videos have performed. That results in a waste of time and resource.

/ / How long has the video usage been going on as a marketing tool?

Even though videos were there for the corporate marketing teams to make use of, I would say in the last two to three years it has picked up a lot. What has happened is that blogging websites and social media websites have grown a lot on the back of interactive videos.

Most of these platforms such as Scoop Whoop, Story Pick, etc. have started including videos as they feel if people are coming to their websites they would like to know the story through a video.

/ / What is the new strategy that these companies have adopted?

The ultimate goal is to make the video viral or at least make it trend so it reaches the maximum number of audiences. And for that to happen, they try to find out the apt distribution channel. The negative aspect of making videos viral is trying click-bait videos that are kind of ruining the support system.

Distribution is the main innovation point here apart from trying to figure out which analytics tools to come up with. A few companies have started doing gamification in the videos.

/ / Has the budget gone up for video marketing?

As things are moving toward digital platforms, it would surely increase.

Soon a time will come when digital video usage in B2B and B2C marketing will be at a comparable state.

Digital video campaigns also help the company find out if a particular campaign or style has got the desired number of buyers or viewers—something that is lacking in TV ads. Analytics is very important as it helps marketers change and tweak their next video content.

/ / Are companies aware of the issue that many a time consumers find the videos too long?

This is one of the biggest problems in long-form videos such as a cricket match. If you upload a 3 hours long T20 match not many people would watch the whole match. That is why we split videos in multiple screens based on the content and USP of that clip

/ / How big is the issue of bandwidth and patchy connection?

Yes, that is a concern for everyone who is related to the creation and consumption of videos. Publishers are worried whether the video will buffer in small towns or not. The audience is everywhere. The solution as of now is that publishers seeing the viewer's connection change the quality of the video. But that is not a permanent solution. People have not gone beyond that on how to solve the issue of bandwidth.