About David Jeyes
David Jeyes is a Director of Product Management at Vbrick, working on the Rev Enterprise Video Platform. Rev helps major brands looking to extract the value of their video library using Analytics and AI.
He hopes to weave video throughout the Enterprise to surface exactly the right content that customers and employees need.
David holds an advanced degree in Cognitive Psychology specializing in Usability and enjoys cooking and gardening with his wife and two daughters.
“We’re looking into how AI can unlock the value of the video library.”
– David Jeyes, Director of Product Management at Vbrick
Socialive: What is a key takeaway you learned from brands producing video content in 2020?
David Jeyes: We’ve seen an acceleration of a lot of existing trends where more traffic and more communication is happening over video. But what has become clear this year is that every brand is a broadcaster. It doesn’t have to be live, but you need to be creating video for your internal and external audiences. Video is more engaging and memorable. To me, it’s the best way you can humanize and connect with people at scale.
SL: What do you consider the top video trend businesses should know about in 2021?
DJ: We see two major trends. First, business continuity. People are finding out just how critical their video infrastructure is in virtual events when you still want to interact with customers or the industry, but you can’t be there in person. Now what we’re seeing is everybody’s generating just massive amounts of the video.
It’s creating this other problem of how to sort through all that content. How do you find the video content that you need later? How do you know it’s fresh? How do you keep things secure? And how do you weave it through the entire enterprise, website, CRM, and throughout?
SL: What do you consider the top challenge for businesses looking to produce video content in 2021?
DJ: As this trend has accelerated, a lot of our customers have found there is a learning curve and being remote doesn’t make it easier. You need the right equipment, the right lighting, and the right video production tools. You need to deal with things like bandwidth constraints.
One of the things I’ve been amazed with is just how much expertise there really is in creating good video. Luckily, we’re fortunate enough to work with teams that often have entire dedicated video teams. But when there are failures, it’s often very public. The one thing I can say is there will always be hiccups, but there’s a lot of value in video in terms of conversion rate and employee engagement in the long run.
SL: What do you think a video content management system looks like for enterprises in 2021?
DJ: At its core, the video content management system in its simplest form adds metadata. Rather than having a video file in Dropbox, the metadata allows for title, descriptions, tagging and categorization. A lot of companies spend a significant amount of time managing taxonomy so that they’ll be able to discover content later.
Today, when you look at video content management, there’s an acceleration in video usage across different teams. When all these teams are creating content, it starts to stack up. You have video being created for maybe a learning management system, a broadcast, a training, and so on.
Once you find that you need all these videos in one place so it’s secure and manageable, we have approval workflows, the ability to see who’s watching it, and how they’re engaging with it. That’s really where content management becomes a need.
What we’re starting to look at is how to use AI to extract value. Where we’re helping out is understanding your video content. What content is going to be useful to them at that moment? How do we show you who’s in the video, what’s being said at the right second, or a scene that you want to get to so you don’t have to watch hours of video content?
SL: What video analytics should marketers pay attention to in 2021?
DJ: From my perspective, you have to look at it from the overall customer journey. There are a lot of engagement analytics like drop off rate and total time viewed, and these matter. But you really are trying to build a relationship with video.
It might be that a user first watches an introduction video, tunes into a live broadcast later, and fills out a lead form. You want to have an understanding of what that overall narrative is through these different touch points and what’s working in terms of the overall picture for the relationship, because in the long haul that’s what really matters.
SL: Will virtual events and experiences be the norm once the pandemic has passed?
DJ: That’s the hardest question. If I could read the future, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere. Anybody who tells you they know what’s going to happen next you is is totally guessing.
A lot of people have built this core competency very quickly of virtual events, and so I can imagine it being a hybrid moving forward. The complexity there is that people pay to attend these conferences. So, if you’re giving that content away for free, how do you deal with tickets for virtual versus in-person events?
I’ve found that some of the biggest conferences that you’d have to travel a week for, you can now just sign up online and get great content about companies that you already have some relationship with for free. It’s a mind-blowing way to increase their communications with users.
SL: How can businesses minimize digital fatigue?
DJ: Honestly, ‘Zoom fatigue’ is a tough one for me and I experience it every day. I’m actually a little bit of an introvert, and I spend probably six or eight hours on Zoom or Webex every day.
I think what we need to figure out is, how do we make video asynchronous or how do we make organizations more asynchronous where we don’t all have to be online at the same time to get that value? That’s part of why we invest so much in the video content management system component of our platform. But it’s a tricky, tricky thing we’ll have to adjust to.
SL: Will video replace other forms of internal communication in 2021?
DJ: Absolutely, it already is. Many companies did in-person town halls and conferences, but now those are all virtual. That was an immediate and sudden shift, but it will likely be hybrid in the future. Marketing, support, training, and even weekly newsletters are shifting to video as companies get larger and more distributed. It’s a great evolution because video is more engaging and memorable. It’s just a matter of taking advantage of that shift within your organization and getting the tools and expertise that you need.
SL: What do you think is next for vBrick?
DJ: At VBrick, we have great traction and a great team. A lot of what we’re thinking about is the future in terms of AI and how we can help unlock the value of the video library and work with our customers. One of the big challenges our customers see is that video content is being created throughout the organization. We’re focused on helping them get their video content into one central place.
Once we know more about that video content, how do we enable not only the understanding of that video, but also power workflows? Think of AI-assisted editing, or workflows for compliance such as if a certain term is mentioned in a video, it is automatically flagged.
We want to help these large organizations manage massive libraries and compliance requirements as well as security and access control to make sure that their brand is safe from data leakage and they are able to communicate effectively at the same time.
SL: Any other thoughts you’d like to share?
DJ: I’m excited to be working in this space during this kind of explosion in video interest and usage. It’s always exciting to work with top-tier brands to help them drive their video strategy and I learn a lot from it. Thanks for having me!
