How to create authenticity in video advertising | Itai Raveh from Uplifted

[Music] I'm now joined by itai RAV from uplifted how you doing today good good thank you did you do the party last night or were you playing it sensible and safe which one yeah good good answer that's the best one I've had yet if people are not familiar with uplifted I know we haven't talked before give us a sense of what it is you do yeah so we help Brands b2c companies gaming applications create high quality video ads when their ual customers so the real customers or the users of the game go into a virtual video shoot and they can create essentially video ads that can be used by the brands later on gotcha now we're always talking about the uh positives as much as we can at these kind of events we do have to touch on the negatives 2023 was a bit rough for everybody whether you're on a developer or people trying to Market their games and uh some folks are saying 2024 is going to pick up but it's a little bit uncertain still lots of layoffs and everything from your perspective what are you hearing from

your clients coming to you is it is it tough out there at the minute so we're quite optimistic overall um we think that there are lots of opportunities in advertising in video specifically uh in our domain coming from the ugc angle we think that there is a lot of potential to actually show that authenticity in advertising exists and that we can kind of take Ai and the creativity of people together to create that effect that will kind of help Brands rise above the noise level when it comes to advertising well I'm sure as part of the general advertising space that you're in you've been using ml for you know a bunch but the de generative AI has also you know made an appearance last year it's had somewhat of a mixed reception from people um it sounds like from what you're saying that you are engaging with that element of it is that true and how do you feel is the best way to use that without either coming at a cost of human creativity um while still

being able to make use of its sort of more useful best aspects yeah so in our domain you know some people say it's an art some people say it's a science we believe that AI is not going to take over completely and humans are not going to take over completely it's going to be the the the merge of both of them converging so we believe that human creativity can be Amplified with AI and can ER get to a place where inspiration and um yeah where essentially AI can Inspire human creativity in a way to enhance whatever it is that you're doing whether it's in advertising or elsewhere gr regarding the video ads themselves there's been so many changes in the ad models throughout the years from banner ads all the way up to kind of industial and videos and then rewarded video ads and all the rest of it where do you feel it's at at the minute what how do we break through cuz people are getting so used to these sort of models the moment the video appears you hit the X you move on like how do you get past that these

days people are very Savvy yeah so we we really believe that as I said earlier that authenticity in advertising exists and if you're able to create authentic but really authentic content and that's where we come in and actually create content with the actual users un scripted content that's where you get the thumb stopping that's where you get the ability to rise above the noise level and actually get people to watch more than 3 seconds of your ad of your messaging to the to the audience if think it's more about presentation or more about content there's a lot of time put sometimes into things that be very slick and cinematic and everything's shot with a kind of animor thing you know where people emulate and film but at the same time it's the weird sketchy SnapChat thing on the phone camera that goes viral in the end so how do you generate something like that so nobody knows what's really going to work but what we see is that people are shifting towards authenticity and are preferring the not Pixel Perfect not the commercial

content but rather the authentic persuasive everyday people just like me and you so I'd rather see somebody just like myself that's super authentic that's super engaged that I know hasn't been given a script uh that I know doesn't have an entire crew behind them um that's how we feel and we see that manifesting in the performance that we deliver to our clients I've been talking to some of the more data focused companies about the way the data is gathered and obviously over the last maybe four years we've had quite a lot of restrictions put on on the kind of data you can capture the kind of metrics you can monitor so if you're doing your authentic kind of marketing how do you know the authenticity is getting through how do you track this stuff nowadays a good question so with iOS 14 and privacy issues what we see a lot of the time because you can't Target well anymore uh people are reverting back to creatives as being the mechanism to Target and so you if you're able to create a lot of different creatives that cater to to different audiences with different Hooks

and different demographics that's essentially the creative that's now going to help you target your users rather than trying to Target them based on likes and so on and so forth so if you're able to create a mass of creatives all of them different in the sense of the people appearing in them the topics they're talking about their ages their profession their location that's essentially your new targeting which which will attract each grade will attract the right audience and in terms of delivery mechanism are you folks working exclusively through mobile like through the app itself through popups do you do any kind of cross stuff with with TV or other media interesting so we're doing mobile we're doing desktop with a lot of gaming companies where we do desktop and YouTube and actually one of our customers now has uh made a TV ad from the content that we helped create from an actual user generated real customer content go okay that's something of a first is it yeah yeah sort about 2024 going forward um I imagine you know continuing what you're doing is top priority but are there any

new things that you're working on any new elements or people you're partnering with that have gotten you excited so we're very much looking into integrating our creative engine into the ad platform so that we can get performance data back and try building a mechanism where we have a flywheel feedback mechanism where we understand what works well and based on that we direct the users in the virtual video shoot to talk about topics or to talk about nuances that work well and that way we create a flywheel that's automatically creating kind of rampant iterations and rampant creative testing uh which is super interesting cuz people Brands need to feed the beast and multiple cultures multiple nuances multiple channels languages you name it uh so the ability to create content quickly at scale that's authentic that's data driven end to end that's something that we see valuable for 2024 and I understand you're about to run off to a talk literally in in moments What's it about so it's about ugc and and in the

era of 2024 gotcha and as far as coming to shows like this from your perspective what's the the benefit or the interest in coming to a kind of physical event so it's interesting because we started uh serving e-commerce Brands this is the first gaming conference we're actually attending really we're seeing big success in uh in gaming in overall as well as applications so lifestyle apps and such uh we love the dynamic we love the energy completely different to Ecom some I say we prefer that so we'll be attending more more of those coming excellent well would hope to see you again in that thank you very [Music] much