The State of AI in Video

The future of video is here — and it’s driven by artificial intelligence.

People want video — and brands are responding. Eighty percent of people say they prefer watching video to reading marketing content and, as a result, 87 percent of marketers say they’re actively creating video content.

But video isn’t a natural slam dunk. Your customers are discerning — people consider about 60 percent of video content to be “clutter” with little meaning and little relevance in their own lives.

The goal, then, isn’t just to create video. Instead, the goal is to produce and share personalized video experiences at the speed and scale necessary to ensure their relevance. To do that, your organization needs to apply the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to both video production and deployment.

The power of AI

AI has the potential to revolutionize video, driving more intelligent production, delivery, and engagement — and a better experience for both enterprise brands and their customers.

AI can determine the video content that generates the best response and deliver more of it. It can reduce time to deploy campaigns, deliver greater personalization at scale, garner insights from consumers, and enable expedited fail-fast testing.

It’s no wonder that with video exploding as a marketing force, more than half of marketers are currently using AI, and by next year more than three-quarters of them will be. Some of the trending use cases emerging now include data analytics, video production itself, and personalizing the video content and consumption experience.

Data analytics

One essential use of AI in video is leveraging data and analytics. When integrated into video intelligence platforms, AI can handle data collection, then analyze behaviors and trends to identify and act on new insights. But that’s just the beginning — AI is advancing beyond data analysis and moving into data generation. Increasingly, machines can glean insights from data-rich media like video without having to manually categorize or describe types of media.

Marketers see an opportunity for AI to improve targeting and personalization in media placements. Sixty percent of marketers believe that AI will have a “substantial or transformational” effect on how they decide programming and approach media buying over the next five years.

Video production

AI is also useful on the production side of video, with automated camera technology improving filming options and video quality. AI-enabled camera equipment reacts to gestures, recognizes and tracks subjects, and swivels to follow action or oral commands.

AI-powered content development allows videographers to develop multiple versions quickly and test them with audiences. AI also enhances video-editing capabilities, such as automatically identifying highlights and creating automated highlights reels.

With Magisto, for example, marketers can create new video content based on uploaded photos or videos. Using Color Match in Premiere Pro, powered by Adobe Sensei, video creators can automatically match color between shots, such as making sure that a performer’s skin tone is consistent across frames. Audio auto ducking intelligently reduces volume of music when overlaid with dialogue. And, rounding out the mix, using puppet tools, animators of any level can create realistic effects such as ripples on water and fluttering flags.

Personalization at scale

AI in video has unparalleled capabilities when it comes to delivering relevance at scale. Marketers can use AI to better understand the wants and needs of their audience, and to act on that information in video content. More relevance in marketing videos translates to greater engagement, conversion, and ROI.

Affective computing researchers, such as those at MIT Media Lab, are doing exciting work with automated emotion recognition and tracking responses to video content. Such advances let video creators test content for audience reaction. Data about customer emotions when they watch video content is helpful for analyzing an ad’s potential effectiveness — viewers are four times more likely to share emotionally charged video ads.

AI is the future of video

Brands need to dive into AI in video — this trend is only going to increase and evolve as new use cases and technologies emerge.

Video intelligence platforms using machine learning help marketers gain an increasingly granular understanding of where their audience is watching and why they’re watching. Such insights enhance a marketer’s ability to interpret and act on their audience’s wants, needs, and goals.

That ability to speak directly to people’s priorities will only increase as hyper-personalization becomes more routine — in future years, marketers may be able create AI-driven video content targeted to an individual viewer.

Other future potentialities in AI for video include gesture control, use- and context-specific tagging to improve product discovery, and neuromarketing and biometric sensing to monitor viewer response. Context-aware marketing, which is also gaining traction, uses natural language processing to better place video ads against relevant video content.

Despite all these amazing possibilities that are either already possible or just around the corner, more than a third of global marketing executives still feel “most unprepared” to effectively use AI, compared to all other technologies they are working with. With AI usage in video growing, there will no doubt be a greater emphasis on novelty and creativity — and the need for more creative human minds executing on it.

Those designers, editors, and creatives who can adapt to these new technologies will gain access to an unparalleled toolbox that extends human reach, simplifies the complex, and frees them up to do what they do best. It’s a win, even for more reluctant adopters. Because, at the end of the day, combining human creativity with AI trends and technologies has the power to make video an even more effective marketing tool — more relevant, more dynamic, and more likely to inspire and delight, all while demanding that creatives flex their creative muscles in even bigger, better ways.

Learn more about Adobe Sensei and the power of artificial intelligence in digital experiences, and check out how AI is transforming product design here.