- Czech-based startup Motionlab is a young video personalization company, winner of CzechInvest, Internet Effectiveness Awards, and a Fénix Content Marketing prize.
- Motionlab collaborates with Microsoft, Boehringer Ingelheim, O2, UNIQA, and Home Credit as their clients.
- The videos, generated on Motionlab platform, furnish an authentic feel to the user experience: they correspond to real customers, their history, and needs in real-time.
Motionlab is an award-winning technology that transfers the customer experience from the physical into the digital realm. This platform enables multi-layer personalization with more than 300 effects, for the satisfaction of both brands and customers. Their innovative solution helps create, render, and distribute a personalized video campaign in less than 15 minutes while staying complex and keeping the highest quality.
What is a personalized video experience?
A personalized video is an offer designed to fit the individual customer’s needs with a personal message in it. The “screenplay” is written by the history of the customer’s engagement with the brand such as shopping history, contract details, or usage of the service.
“Imagine that you open an advertisement you receive from your favorite brand, from your bank, telco provider, or from the last event you attended, and you find inside a video that was created just for you(…) instead of receiving the news with the product you are not interested to see or buy”, Jan Sekerka, Co-founder and CEO of Motionlab tells ITKeyMedia.
The video personalization is dedicated to making the customer feel dear and special. It has a simple and digestible format and strives to provide only the most relevant offers. “This is the kind of experience that we digital customers deserve”, says Jan, and adds that the brands require it as well if they truly care about the experience of their customers.
In times of COVID, the personalization trend has become even more urgent. The founder of Monetize CX and a member of the jury of international competitions Peter Kmoško believes that the closer the companies are to their customers the higher is their chance to succeed. He shares his insights into the market in the circumstances of current pandemics:
“In general, there are two strong customer trends: (A) attack on loyalty. According to McKinsey, as much as 75% of consumers changed the brand, the channel, or the way to the product/solution. So those companies, which are closer to customers and can listen to their changed expectations (not needs) can be winners. And (B) the digitalization in the first 3 months of 2020 was the same, as 10 previous years. So people are using digital for remote work (even if they were against this previously) and people, who wanted to attend the bank are now in a position to give up and use the digital means”, Peter tells ITKeyMedia.
How does it work?
- A customer orders a product
- A personalized video is generated in real-time
- A customer receives the video in an email
The video holds the customer’s name, the ordered product, and location, but also includes a suggestion based on the customer’s interests. It, therefore, provides an offer with a “call-to-action” button and is finally followed by the analytics of the campaign. Some of the best examples in Czech languages with English subtitles can be found on Motionlab vimeo page. The presented videos touch on a variety of topics, from life insurance to recruitment campaigns.
Being a SaaS platform, not a full-service agency, Motionlab collaborates with agencies as business partners and together they create winning end-user experiences for companies.
According to Jan, video personalization has a much broader impact than just in ROI measured sectors, since the aim of the solution is to improve people’s quality of life especially when used in areas such as health care and education. The personalized video experience can bring success to most companies. As Peter Kmoško shares, “if the personalization has the power to increase sales conversion by approx 7 times, this is the right area to help the companies to succeed”.
“Motionlab combines two things that can engage: video and personalization. Most of us prefer to watch a video instead of reading”, Peter tells ITKeyMedia. Motionlab’s solution can be compared to making any customer feel they stand out of the crowd, and the service provided for them is special. Peter believes Motionlab can deliver on this promise.
The creation process
With video personalization being a complex process, Motionlab creates hundreds of videos literally in a couple of clicks. The company managed to transform the sophisticated workaround by keeping its basics. The creation process starts from a video script, prepared based on the client’s knowledge of customers, combined with the goals they want to achieve and supported by the exact data they have gathered. It might have included details surrounding sound clarity, for which the company might have used microphone attachment (check https://serp.co/best/action-camera-microphone-attachment/ to learn more about action camera microphone) for better sound production. The next step is rendering a video personalization on Motionlab’s cloud-based platform, where the customers’ data is imprinted into a video template. As a final step, thanks to the technological integrations into industry-leading providers and services, the videos are effortlessly distributed as ad hoc campaigns or on-demand. Naturally, the technology is fully compliant with the EU data protection framework, and, Jan shares, Motionlab has passed the highest security checks of demanding bank providers.
Inspiration
Motionlab grew from the idea to a business in less than a year. The company was created at the end of 2018 as Jan Sekerka joined Radek Pšurný and Filip Koubek who owned a video production company previously. In 2017 Radek and Filip started to search for a service that would enable the creation of personalized videos for a great number of clients but they were not satisfied with what they could find at the time. Jan joined the two co-founders to work with the technology that instantly rendered the volume.
The company grew massively with no input from investors and won multiple Czech marketing awards. Moreover, the company succeeded against strong competition from more than two thousand European startups in the Startup World Cup & Summit 2019 as the winner of the regional round. The team also spent several months in the USA participating in the VentureOut accelerator program as a holder of the national grant provided by CzechInvest.
Clients and projects
Video personalization provides a great scope of possibilities and can be applied in most industries. Therefore, in such a short time span Motionlab gained an impressive variety of leading global and European companies as their clients: Home Credit, ČSOB (part of KBC), INSIA, UNIQA, Komerční banka (part of Société Générale); IT giants as Microsoft, Lenovo and the biggest CEE e-commerce platforms Alza.cz, Mall.cz; leading pharmaceutical companies as Boehringer Ingelheim; Telco Mobile provider (based on O2’s network), and many others. And while they see their ideal client as having wide customer data, using video as a common part of their media mix and personalization as a part of their customer winning strategy, – the company seems to adapt to almost any case.
The purpose of video personalization within the companies also differs: while some of Motionlab’s clients use video personalization for business offers, others apply the service in areas of internal communication, event planning, or HR marketing. Among the projects Motionlab is most proud of, Jan listed the video personalization of INSIA which helped to explain complex service offers to customers, and O2 personalized videos that served to create awareness about donations needed during the COVID outbreak.
Remarkably, in the circumstances of the global crisis, Motionlab has exceeded the yearly target (there have been more than one million videos generated on the platform) and the numbers are still growing. “Currently we have the largest volume of orders from three verticals: finance and insurance, e-commerce, energy, and utilities but the demand from new industries is increasing as the digital transformation is still in process, now faster than ever before”, Jan shares.
The key to the company’s success in times of turmoil may be found in their readiness to serve the customers’ personal needs with understanding and compassion. “Real personalization in the digital environment is still at the beginning of its journey but the empathy, the virtual „human touch” and customer experience emerge as a critical strategy now with the COVID-19 crisis”, says Jan.
The company holds a rather positive outlook on the development of the industry in the current circumstances and Jan emphasizes that digitalization only intensifies. It grows in both internal direction, with infrastructure and data, and the external, as to communication, says Jan, and underlines that the demand for non-physical personalized communication is on the rise.
Irena is a Ukrainian writer and translator living in Estonia. Graduated from Tallinn University with an MA in Humanities in 2019. Dedicated to raising environmental awareness in Eastern Europe and bringing global readers together.
