Using artificial intelligence, Danish start-up Flowsam has created a tool for marketing teams to test video campaigns before they hit consumers’ social media feeds. An estimate of AED 19 billion is spent annually on advertising digital video ads globally, but for many companies, it is left to chance whether consumers actually notice the logo, product and message, which can be crucial for selling products and building brands.
Flowsam is offering an online tool where you can test and optimize your brand’s video content, and thus get more out of your media spend. The four experienced marketers behind Flowsam are aiming directly at the global market and with a plug ‘n play SaaS solution and several international companies already on board.
Experienced marketers behind Flowsam
Caroline Deichmann-Bendixen is one of the founders behind Flowsam, and has for many years been at the forefront of global brand campaigns at Arla Foods, where she has experienced both the time-consuming and costly task of testing brand performance in video ads. “I had a large team responsible for ensuring quality video content across all brands and channels, but heavy and expensive testing processes meant that only the most important campaign videos could be tested, which is far from satisfactory production costs and media spend considered”, says Caroline.
Therefore, she decided to, in collaboration with three partners from the industry, solve the problem with AI and data.
Artificial intelligence should help brands get more out of ads
The Flowsam team has developed an algorithm that, using neural networks prediction, is trained to predict the focus the consumers will have in a video and where their attention will be and for how long. The team at Flowsam says this attention is critical when developing your storytelling to brand and sell your goods since you have to not only entertain but also make sure that the brand has a role to play in the story. It is about making sure that your own brand/product is caught by the consumer’s eye and attention – if you do not succeed, the marketing investment can very easily turn out to be lost, or at best be too expensive.
Marketers are used to measuring ad performance in clicks and likes but have so far not had the tools to measure brand performance as well. With Flowsam you could save time and money and get detailed predictions within minutes.
Jon Voetmann, one of the co-founders behind Flowsam, gave Campaign a trial of the interface of this tool. Flowsam predicts where the human eye goes and can be used instead of focus groups for testing a video.
Challenging giants & democratising the test process
Flowsam disrupts an important area of pre-testing in the consumer research and eye-tracking industry and aims at making the process easier and affordable for all marketing departments – even those with small budgets – to test brand performance of all videos produced, from Instagram to TV. What used to be only for the very big brands is now available to everyone. And just making data available easily and quickly will help a lot of brands that insource their creative resources, but so far haven’t been able to test all their video content.
Flowsam attracts attention in the industry
The use of using artificial intelligence as a tool to test and optimize video ads is not coming only from Flowsam’s creator and several major global companies have already signed up to use the tool as part of their video production process.
Flowsam also resonates within the marketing research industry. Former VP of Google US and now Marketing Consultant & Professor at Kellogg Management School Northwestern Jim Lecinski is convinced that Flowsam will be an indispensable tool for everyone who works with video marketing and branding. “Once you’ve tried Flowsam, you can’t imagine developing video content without pre-testing and gaining insights through Flowsam. The tool is a perfect example of what I’m talking about in my new book, ‘The AI Canvas of Marketing”, Lecinski says. Jim Lecinski and his colleagues will be using Flowsam in their new AI and Marketing classes at Kellogg’s Management School.
