How a global tech provider scaled video production without increasing its budget

Akamai works behind the scenes to power and protect billions of people who spend time online. Akamai’s suite of leading security, computing, and content delivery solutions help global companies make life better for billions of people to connect with their favorite brands to shop online, play games, share ideas, manage money, and so much more.

Akamai uses Socialive to record, edit, publish, and livestream video to its distributed team. With nearly 9,000 employees dispersed over 40 locations, these streamed events are critical to keeping employees informed and engaged. The ability to create in a cloud-based platform is vital to streamlining their production process.

Scaling video creation across a global enterprise

The shift to a remote working environment in 2020 exposed Akamai’s reliance on a traditional video creation model. While the global company had a distributed workforce, it required a physical production studio to stage and stream massive events across its global audiences.

Simon Gerzina, Akamai’s Senior Global Events Manager, Digital and Production, recognized that the loss of in-person interactions strained the team’s ability to create content. Staging each event — which consists of up to 500 recorded videos mixed with live segments — was a tall task to pull off without a physical studio.

“The norm for webcasting has always been encoders that you can reach out and touch and control in front of you. But the reliance on on-premises technology has increasingly felt like the point of failure in the events that we've run. We wanted a solution that was more resilient, especially considering the majority of production was also placeless. So moving streaming into the Cloud — end to end — was a really big priority for us.”

‍Simon Gerzina, Senior Global Events Manager, Digital & Production, Akamai

Like many other companies at the time, Akamai began to explore virtual event platforms. “We had a series of false starts in which we learned what wasn't going to work,” Gerzina said. For example, many event solutions don’t solve for varied time zones. Creating content with a dozen people located across different parts of the world created scheduling headaches.

Recording videos took too long to maximize the team’s output. Each video took about two days to edit, and in order to meet demand the team relied on agencies, which cost as much as $100,000 over the course of a year.

Additionally, Akamai’s events team struggled to maintain consistent, professional quality and branding for users in an intuitive experience. After some trial and error, Akamai turned to Socialive. “Once we found what was going to work, we put ourselves on a journey of getting really good at using those tools, “ Gerzina continued.

Socialive powers the growing middle

Akamai leverages Socialive for internal-facing use cases, including sales kickoff meetings (SKOs) and all-hands meetings. The global events team relies on the platform to:

• Remotely create repeatable, professional-looking, and on-brand videos that live up to Akamai’s reputation as a leading technology solution
• Democratize video content creation so more employees across the organization can contribute video content
• Remotely record speakers across time zones, which can then be edited together for the full broadcast
• Produce high-quality content with little user friction
• Move away from on-premises technology with a cloud-based solution

“Socialive takes what can be very complex features and makes them accessible. We now have the ability to enable more people to become creators of increasingly more sophisticated video content.”

‍Simon Gerzina, Senior Global Events Manager, Digital & Production, Akamai

Akamai has found the sweet spot with Socialive. As a large enterprise, the tech company typically has multiple options to solve for a particular need. And when it comes to creating video, “I always think of us as having three tiers of options: low, middle, and high. We have very few people using the options at the highest tier, which includes hiring production companies, booking soundstages, sending out multi-camera crews, and spending months in pre-production and creative development,” Gerzina said.

For the bottom-end video, Akamai team members relied on meeting tools to create video content. Whether it was Zoom or WebEx, they would self-record demos, tutorials, and webinars. The result was varying levels of picture quality and recordings that required tons of editing in post-production. While their contributors were used to creating video remotely, doing it with great agility, and being self-starters, the professional touch was missing. Deploying Socialive was a way to boost the bottom-tier video into a middle-tier that was easy to use, yet with a higher quality in the output.

Akamai found it was relatively seamless to get employees who were already accustomed to recording videos in the bottom tier to start embracing the middle tier. With Socialive, these users can continue quickly and easily recording videos in an intuitive platform. But now their content looks more polished thanks to Socialive’s drag-and-drop layouts, overlays, graphics, and lower thirds.

With a growing middle tier, Akamai has been able to cut down its number of top-tier productions. As a result, their team can redistribute budget and resources to produce even more high-quality videos in the cloud. “The middle has to have elements of the tiers that surround it,” Gerzina said. “It has to have as much of the quality of the band above it as possible. But it also has to have the ease of use of the band below it. The middle isn’t its own space — it’s the best of the things that surround it.”

Getting busy executives, customers, and partners to participate in a 15-minute video recording is a win as it is. But getting them to adopt a new tool that requires significant training is often simply unattainable.

With Socialive, Akamai’s speakers can join from their smartphone or desktop browser with no prior video production expertise.

“The idea that we can have a preferred tool that can work in almost every way we work has been really important. In the year plus that we've been using Socialive, most of the other video acquisition tools we use have become backup solutions for extreme exceptions. And I think that really alludes to how flexible Socialive has proven to be for us.”

‍Simon Gerzina, Senior Global Events Manager, Digital & Production, Akamai

The ability to say “yes” and create more video

Since switching to Socialive, Akamai has been able to scale up video production across its global enterprise — without sacrificing quality. With Socialive, Akamai has:

• Streamlined post-production and shortened timelines by three days: “Things that felt like momentous wins a year ago are status quo today,” Gerzina said. It used to take Akamai’s global events team about a week to record speakers and complete post-production ahead of the company’s all-hands meetings.
• After switching to Socialive, that five-day turnaround quickly became a two-day turnaround. So Gerzina’s team keeps setting the bar higher: The two-day turnaround has now become a same-day turnaround. The team takes about 50% of the time it used to create videos — largely driven by time-savings in the editing process between 12 and 24 hours per video.

“The ability to mostly eliminate post-production and have more and more of our content becoming live-to-tape with a really light post-production process has dramatically shortened our turnaround times for creating recorded content.”

‍Simon Gerzina, Senior Global Events Manager, Digital & Production, Akamai

• Higher output and increased scale: “One of the ways I've looked at the value Socialive has provided us is that we can continue spending the same amount of money and just do a lot more stuff,” Gerzina said. Before the team was overtaxed and lacked the resources to meet demand — an issue that’s now a thing of the past. The team eliminated the bottlenecks in their production capacity by making it easier for anyone to create video in a standardized process. This had the added benefit of reducing the cost and time it would have taken to create the increased amounts of video.
  As a result, Akamai is hosting larger-scale virtual events and creating more snackable content from those events. “No one I report up to has asked me to shave off spend. They’ve asked me to be able to say ‘yes’ more. And now we can,” Gerzina said. Each month Gerzina’s team creates more than 25% more video content than they were able to create before Socialive.
• Reduced spend on additional resources: With nearly 9,000 employees distributed across the globe, Akamai consumes a lot of internal video content. Video is a significant component of its onboarding, enablement, communications, and learning programs. Since becoming a more video-centric organization, Akamai has expanded its reach.
  Previously Akamai executives flew to each office, presented as much information as possible, and would ultimately only engage with a few hundred employees during each stop. With the power of video, each executive can present to 100% of the company. To reach more individuals across the organization, many meetings are becoming live streams, and written content is now video-first. Cutting out the airline, accommodation, food, and other travel expenses related to sending executives to in-person events has produced an ROI for Akamai.
  
• Additionally, staffing these in-person events, bringing in additional people to help create videos, and additional support for events cost Akamai around $100,000 annually in agency fees. With Socialive, it’s easier to create video to drive authentic interactions between executives and employees without running a high budget.
• Featured more diverse voices: Moving away from on-premises technology and embracing the Cloud has enabled Akamai to include more of its people in the production process. “One of the things that's been really important, and maybe unanticipated, in how we're using Socialive is the ability to bring more people into the process. As a very diverse organization, it’s important we actually hear from diverse voices. But who got to be in the room and whose voice was represented used to be restricted to geography. In using Socialive, we've been able to hear from more voices and started to involve more people as collaborators and content creators both in front of and behind the camera,” Gerzina said.

“Our content is being shaped by more collaborators who perhaps would have been excluded from the process a couple of years ago. And that's been really, really exciting for me as both a content creator and as a beneficiary of that content.”

‍Simon Gerzina, Senior Global Events Manager, Digital & Production, Akamai

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