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January 17, 2017

Read time: 3min

The world of video analytics is now

Market Logic Team

Imagine a world where it’s easy to gather video feedback from hundreds of consumers via seamlessly integrated customer journeys and to extract both qualitative and quantitative value from that data. According to our good friend Carl Wong at LivingLens, that world is 2017. Carl and our team were chatting at an innovation think tank last week where he shared these numbers:

All good food for thought. Video is the world’s largest and fastest-growing research asset, as consumer insight and customer experience professionals increasingly tap the record button for deeper and more authentic consumer understanding.

Of course, video research delivers great qualitative takeaways (and at least x4 the amount of data compared to open-ended text questions), from candid facial expressions and nuances in tone of voice, to telltale actions that speak way louder than words. What’s even more exciting at this point is that video is delivering quantitative findings, from the percentage of respondents that are emotionally positive or negative towards a concept, to the frequency of topic mentions and sentiment analysis. Technical advances in speech recognition, computer vision, and intelligent emotional coding are opening doors to a world of video analytics.

Video is a great way to understand the real voice of the consumer, but at what cost? Over the last years, video research has gone hand in hand with production crews, hours of laborious transcription and expensive editing suites.  Carl says it used to take 40 hours of professional effort to transform ten hours of video content into a ten-minute, killer story.  Today, recording costs are melting way as smartphones eliminate the need for production effort and respondents happily opt in to video programs as the easiest way to share their thoughts. In post-production, video search technologies help editors transform hours of tape to minutes of story in less than a tenth of the time. 

Most importantly, advanced transcription and search techniques mean marketers and researchers can easily re-use all those video recordings that used to sit on hard drives in your desk drawer. At Market Logic, clients simply enter a search term on their insights platform to jump straight to the point in the video where the respondent discusses their topic of interest. Snippets are easily selected and bookmarked in sizzle reels to bring a presentation to life. 

All the good reasons to tap into video as a true data source are clear, so it looks like 2017 will finally bring the means to reap full value from video data for faster, richer customer stories.