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

CHALLENGE

Scaling video production across a global enterprise

The pandemic exacerbated the challenges that many large enterprises with global workforces and customers face. “For a distributed company, we relied very heavily on the ability to do things in person,” Gerzina said. At the beginning of 2020, they had just built a new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts intended, among other things, for people to gather face to face and attend in-person events.

And then, of course, the rest of 2020 happened. Akamai was already accustomed to producing videos to share with its global audiences. But the organization could no longer rely on physical production studios or even the ability to sit two people down across from each other to create content. Gerzina’s team was forced to start working very differently.

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

Additionally, Akamai’s events team struggled to maintain consistent quality and branding from afar without overly complicating the user 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.

SOLUTION

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 our 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

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.

“At the bottom end of the scale we have people using business tools to create video content. They're jumping to Zoom or WebEx, and they're self recording a demo or a tutorial or a webinar. These are the people who are very used to creating video remotely, doing it with great agility, and being self starters. So for us, deploying Socialive was actually more about developing a middle tool that was accessible yet higher quality than the low tier,” Gerzina continued.

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.

OUTCOME

The ability to say “yes” more

Since switching to Socialive, Akamai has been able to better scale remote video production across its global enterprise — without sacrificing quality. Results include:

Streamlined post-production and shorter timelines: “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.

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. For us, there's always been more appetite to create video than we had the resources to create. And a lot of that is a human bottleneck. The more time you spend managing logistics and post production, the less time you spend creating content — and the less content you create. The ability to create efficiency everywhere in that process has allowed us to simply make more things,” Gerzina said. As a result, Akamai is hosting larger scale virtual events and creating more content inventory 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 continued.

Better reach: 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. “A good example is our internal all-hands programs. We used to fly executives around to major offices worldwide to go on a whistlestop tour over the course of two or three weeks. They might be in six different cities in pretty rapid fire in order to engage groups of a few hundred employees at a time. During the pandemic, that became a virtual program. As a virtual program, we had much better adoption because we could actually touch everyone. We went from only being able to get in front of maybe 50% of our population, to being able to get in front of 100% of our people with the recording and 80% live,” Gerzina said. Because of the success of this program, others have begun to follow suit. To reach more individuals across the organization, many meetings are becoming webcasts. And written content such as case studies are becoming video first.

More inclusive: 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.

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