To have an effective Personal Video campaign follow these best practices when approaching the creative and production stages:


  • Structure: Personal Videos should follow the AIR structure:
    1. Awareness – Provide useful information.
    2. Insights – Help with analyzing and understanding the content.
    3. Recommendation – Drive customers to perform an action.
  • Length: It is important to keep communications succinct, due to viewers’ dropping attention spans. Whenever possible, videos should be kept to under 90 seconds. For FB Connect integrations, videos should be kept to under 60 seconds.
  • Beginning: Viewers should see that the video is personalized in the first few frames. This can be done by including their name on the screen during the welcome section.
  • Focus: It is important to stay focused on the key messages and supporting information. This helps in driving customers to action.
  • Takeaways: it should be easy to the viewer in understanding whether the information provided is positive or negative from her perspective.
  • Tone: The tone should be warm, welcoming and personal. The primary goal of the PV is to be useful for to the customer.
  • Visualization: One of the key advantages of video is the power of visualization. It is therefore critical to find effective ways to visualize the data that is shown to the customer in order to help her understand, trigger an emotional reaction and dramatically increase the information retained.
  • Creativity: Engaging creative may be a bit more costly, but it also drives customer engagement and perception.
  • Information: PVs provide an engaging way of communicating new information to customers. It is best to use this medium to enrich the information already communicated through other channels.
  • Names: Names are a key personalization element and should always appear as text in the video. Adding names as part of the VO also delivers a “wow moment” to customers. Names should be part of the scene, e.g. on a cake, on a license plate of the car or even in surprising places e.g. on a wing of an airplane.
  • Level of personalization: The story should feel like a personal story. Just adding a name to a generic story is not enough. The level of personalization should be aligned with the Personalized Video’s objectives. As a general rule, there should be between 4 – 8 dynamic elements. Fewer dynamic elements might give the feeling of a generic video while having too many dynamic elements may overly complicate the project while adding relatively little marginal value. The personal data used in the video should contribute to the story rather.
  • Relevance: Our technology allows us to tailor the storyline to each customer, not just the data. This is done by using our Dynamic Scene Selection, which improves relevance through choosing the scenes (“chapters of the story”) that are most relevant for each customer. As an example, a customer that is already using paperless billing would not be prompted to move to paperless billing, but rather to move to autopay.
  • Relativity: Whenever possible, it is useful and engaging to show customers visual comparisons between them and other customer demographics.
  • Disclaimers: It is best to include any required legal disclaimers on the email, rather than in the video. Including these in the video detracts from the conversational tone of the experience.
  • Simple language: Use simple language. Avoid industry jargon like “IRR”, “billing cycle”, etc.