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Vloggi – Tapping into Community-Generated Video Boasting customers like MYOB, JAX Tyres and Auto, JUCY rental vans, the NSW Government, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and Hamilton the Musical Australia, Vloggi is a crowdsource video platform that allows the creation of professional looking community video at scale. DESPITE COVID, 2021 has been a busy year for the Australian headquartered start-up with a successful fund-raising round, support for full high-definition uploads and downloads, and a global launch seeing both customer and visitor growth, especially throughout North America. According to Founder Justin Wastnage, the idea for Vloggi came out of the pre-COVID travel industry. “The solution that we identified about three years ago for the travel and tourism industry,” he says, “was if we could build a network, build a platform where visitors to fancy locations who were the most likely to have shot amazing video, provide a platform for them to share that with the marketing agencies, tourism boards, and other agencies, to use that footage. “The travel and tourism industry, on average, every player in that, needs about 110 hours of video per year and currently they’re only producing about 20, and that’s the good ones. So, there’s a massive deficit there, and that can only really be bridged by using user-generated video, but at the moment it’s very, very hard to get that video from consumers. You either have to set up an Instagram campaign and then you have to somehow drag the videos off, upload them, download them, add comments, seek permissions, or you could set up your own Dropbox folder, but that’s very time consuming. “User-generated video has about seven times the conversion power of paid creative, so it’s a very powerful tool, and is also a lot cheaper. However, the problem was always that this video is actually locked, essentially, in 3.6 billion smart phones, so most of the best footage is never released.” Vloggi operates as a software as a service (SaaS) model. There are four tiers. The free tier gives users access Vloggi-created templates and 50 clips per project, while the cost to paying customers depends on number of users, and the kind of templating they want. For paid tiers, the number of clips per project ranges from 150 to 300, up to unlimited videos and API integration. “We have a four-stage process which we call P.U.M.P.,” says Wastnage. “The first stage
is ‘Plan’ where a customer comes in and essentially says who they’re going to source the video from. Is it going to be primarily their customers, their community or their colleagues, and from there they can set things like is it a permanent campaign, do they want to turn on the tap and just grow a video library or do they want to put a timeline on it? For commercial ones they might want to add an incentive. They can also set all the filming brief, add terms and conditions, confirm who the copyright belongs to because the copyright belongs to the client. They also set the look and feel. We grab their logo, turn it into a whiteout PNG which is then transformed into a watermark. The lower thirds are changed into their colours and font, so instantly the video looks like theirs.
“User-generated
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highlights reel from just the best clips, and they can start adding tags. Some of the tags are added automatically, some of them are added manually, this is up to our customers, and then basically the ‘P’ is ‘Publish’. They can just publish as many different combinations, different compilations as they want.
video has about seven times
the conversion
“This is a community video tool,” concludes Wastnage, “so [our customers] are mainly recruiting the audience from Facebook and mainly distributing via Facebook, that’s about 70 per cent of our use, because typically brands or whoever will have an active community on Facebook.
power of paid
creative, so it’s
a very powerful
tool, and is also a lot cheaper.
The next stage is ‘Upload’. Vloggi customers will then send potential contributors an invite to a web page where thy will confirm details such as their name and location. The contributor then selects a video from their phone which is uploaded and encoded with branding elements applied. The Vloggi platform uses an FFmpeg-based encoder. The encoding process will ‘pillarbox’ the sides of vertical videos, or ‘pillarbox’ and blur out the sides of a square video.
“We are actively targeting video from people’s phones because the market we’re trying to unlock is that demographic of people who don’t ordinarily upload and share video. So, not influencers. Influencers would already know how to edit their GoPro videos together and whatever. That isn’t the target demographic.” Visit www.vloggi.com
“Then it’s ‘M’ for merge,” says Wastnage. “Rather than edit video together, you just select the clips you want and merge them. Essentially, we got rid of editing. The merge also has tags and ratings. If a team is working together, say a marketing team, they all may go in and they may like various clips that they’re getting because they can see the submissions coming in. They start to like them and then they can make a
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Vloggi CEO Justin Wastnage
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