Welcome to Human Marketing, a weekly podcast for B2B marketers. Unpacking how brands can stay authentic, demonstrate authority, and build trust as AI floods or feeds with content. I'm Chris Nelson, founder of Human Video. We remotely produce podcasts and other video content, real humans and just the right amount of soul. Today I'm joined by Sam Balter, head of content at the video marketing platform, Wistia. Sam was previously at ZoomInfo for four years and HubSpot for five years before that. Welcome, Sam.

So happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Chris,

We were just chatting before we started there telling you about how I've been using Wistia and been a customer of Wistia for 11 years. I'm a big fan of the brand. I've kind of feel like I've been on the journey with you guys right from when it was basically just a video hosting platform. Back then, the big differentiator was that you were the only platform that was really good with stats for video. It was a whole thing to be able to see heat maps of people viewing videos and where they were dropping off and they watch exciting stuff. Did they watch? Totally, yeah,

Yeah. Did they like it? At

Which point did they just run away? It was always really

Interesting. Yeah, what was really boring? What was really interesting, what people are scrolling through, what do they actually stop at

A hundred percent and in that time, what I've really admired whiskey for is actually the video content that they produce and all the content that put out into the world. It's always felt like it's kind of a step ahead. It's always been really fun. They've been brilliant at humanising the company, showing the staff, showing behind the scenes, including Lenny, the dog featured heavily through the years and yeah. It's great to have you on by way of starting. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey? I mentioned your time in ZoomInfo and HubSpot. Can you just give me a little potted history of what you've been involved with and what you did it, those two companies and now at wia?

Yeah, so a little bit of my journey. I, let's see. I started out out of college and I worked for a startup, kind of in finance looking at mining finance, so not crypto, just actual commodities and things like that. I was in that space for a little bit and it was really entertaining. I got to learn a lot about startups and then I moved over to tech because I wasn't that big a fan of finance and wanted to move into the tech space and started at a company called Waterfall, which later got acquired, which was like SMS or text message marketing. From there, I moved over to HubSpot, which was basically a company I had grown up in my career getting all of my answers from anytime at a startup. Anytime I needed to learn how to do something, I would find myself on the HubSpot blog, I'd find myself on HubSpot Academy.
Everything I learned in marketing, I essentially learned from HubSpot and I did go to business school, but even business school was significantly behind HubSpot in terms of what they were offering for advice on marketing. And so I got the opportunity to work there and it was this fantastic opportunity to work in their demand gen department. I did that for a few years, working on enterprise accounts and helping build out the enterprise segment. Then I started working over, switched over to the small business segment, sales enablement. So I got to do a lot of different big chunks there. And then I was starting, I wouldn't say quite to the point of Burt out, but I wanted to really focus on content. And I got really lucky at HubSpot where there was this opportunity that came up to host a podcast. They were coming up with their second podcast, they had the growth show, which had been going on for years, and they wanted to do a mass market kind of podcast that was more broadly applicable and there was tryouts and I totally missed the announcement for it and I didn't know anything about it.
And then I was out at somebody's going away party drinking and just shooting the shit with people just being ridiculous. And the guy, the producer, Matt Brown was there and he was like, oh, you should apply for this. You should try and do this. You would be funny, it'd be great. So I did got the role and then started basically working on this podcast, weird work, and then from there switched over to working into podcasting and podcast marketing. So I made kind of the larger jump into content from there, and that was a hugely amazing, wonderful opportunity for me there.

And it must've been, I mean if that's six or seven years ago, that was kind of before many B2B companies were producing podcasts. Surely that must've been relatively early in that world. Of course, HubSpot were kind of ahead of the curve in many of the things that they did, but I imagine that was a pretty wild ride.

And it was great because it was like we got lucky where we had a lot of autonomy to make a very fun show. So we just interviewed people with weird jobs and it was really exciting. And then we found ways to monetize it for HubSpot and stuff like that. But I think there was one moment where somebody who worked at HubSpot was, I was talking to them about podcast and I was like, oh yeah, I host the show Weird work. And he was like, oh, you host that show. And I was like, yeah. He's like, oh, me and my wife love that show. And I was like, that's a HubSpot show. And he was like, oh, no, I saw it on iTunes, new and noteworthy. And I was like, this is the accomplishment to me. Somebody just not who's ad HubSpot listening to the show loves it, family loves it.
And I was like, I've really done this is fantastic. So that was a really great opportunity and I got to work on building up other shows and got a better understanding of newer media stuff of how do these shows work, how do podcasts grow, how are they different than other forms of content? And I got this great opportunity there, continued in content for a while, and then got an offer to work over at ZoomInfo to sort of do a lot of different content on that side, so more editorial content, more research content, and actually lead a team of content people. And so that was my first opportunity in leading a team of content producers and content creators and got to be part of ZoomInfo from pre IPO through the IPO and all of that, which was a really fantastic opportunity at a really weird time because I think I started there and then the first week I was like, I'm not really going to meet the people. I was like, oh, I'll meet everybody on my team in person next week. And then

I think I know what's

Coming, lockdowns happened and then I was from then on out it was like, okay, it was a totally different environment, a different kind of thing to get used to. So it was a really great opportunity and good time. And then I find wanted to switch companies, get a new job, and that's when I worked and applied over to get here at Wistia. And I had, you had been following Wistia for years, had been a huge fan of the content, huge fan of the brand and the way the product evolved had really spoken to me in a way. So I tried very, very hard to get the job here.

I love it. Stemming back just very slightly you mentioned about the pandemic and that kind of moment of scrambling to adapt to that, it was a big thing for me. For the past 15 years, I've been a commercial filmmaker, kind of travelling around the world with big cameras, trying to make nice videos and someone who gets on planes for living the pandemic was not great and very quickly had to pivot to remote production or trying to do that as well as possible. And that ultimately I kept doing that in some form and has led to the creation of my new company Human Video, which is completely remote video production, literally doing what we're doing right now. How was that time for thinking that moment of, oh, we can't go to studios or we can't do what we were doing before. Tell me a little bit about that moment and how you adapted to it I guess, and what the legacy of that has been maybe as well.

Yeah, I mean for me, I think a certain part of it was, and for many marketers, the instant thing was just like, oh, we're fucked. This is going to be tough. The way we produce videos, the way you make things, the way you make content. I am an extroverted in-person person. I like to talk to people, I like to engage with people, I like to have actual conversations in real life. And so it was worrisome and confusing and stuff like that, but I think over time what I started to notice is that certain people were really good at it if you just got out of their way and said, make the video the way, make a video, you make it. I believe you can make it and I will help you to make it. And they were like, let's work on scripting, let's doing these other things.
And I feel like what I started to learn was that a lot of keys were being held by people that were stopping employees from just making video content or that there was a lot of barriers in the process that had built up of this is how we have to shoot, this is how long it has to be edited for and stuff like that, that if you started empowering individual marketers to like, oh, start making this video on your own, start doing this. People were actually churning out good content. And I think what was really interesting to me was I was learning that at this time, especially over the pandemic, you have massive increases in TikTok and TikTok usage. So you have this new sort of style, not new but evolved style of video where it's very authentic, very chill, here's on my phone, here's walking and talking, here's all these other things.
And none of that needed to be recorded by video producer who knows all of the dials and the buttons on the camera, which I am not. It is just one of those things, it's like anybody could theoretically do this if they could understand the actual basic parts of scripting, having a good topic, having an engaging hook, delivering on the promises you're giving. And so I felt like it was a really, really hard time, but it forces you to rethink what is the process we actually need. And some of these videos that were just making in our apartments or in people's houses are doing better than the videos we were shooting with a whole production team. And so it's like this is not because those previous videos were bad, but it's like consumer preferences are changing and the capabilities of any individual marketer or business person is also changing.
And so to me, it made me think more and more about the marketer of the future and the marketer who's going to be successful is somebody who can touch or do different parts of this process and can bring people in to help them. They can't be totally not. It made me realise that you can't live in this system with marketing where it's like you do one thing, you pass it off to the next person and then you never touch it again. The more marketers are collaborative together and the more that marketers are able to work across and work together on a project, the better off it's going to be. And so it really for me started focusing on what I wanted my marketing team to be is one that was adaptable. Ones that each individual person had an understanding of what the video person was doing or editing and they understood the content or the SEO and that the more people even understood little bits of each other's work, the more we could churn out.
So all of a sudden a three person team is doing the work of a five person team, a six person team, because there's not the same level of barriers and I think you have to break a lot of those barriers down when you're not in person and you don't have a lot of that functionality and you have to build up new process and new trust where it's like you can trust and go back and forth in a different way. And so I think the legacy, it was a real challenge, but I think what has come out of it for really successful brands or for really successful marketing teams is marketers who are more adaptable. They have more understandings of different parts of the creative process and they are more autonomous in that they can work in their own house, they can work in their own environment and they do not need all as much stuff around them to produce great content.

I love that and I totally see that legacy again, kind of what is made me form an entire company around that concept. Nearly everybody that I produce content with is in their hucks, even if it's a massive CEO of a really big enterprise, they're quite often still just in their home office. And the joy of remote production is that no matter where a company's employees or customers are, we can just with a little bit of remote help and then dialling in just like we're doing here, anything's possible now. And absolutely I see again as a sort of veteran, commercial filmmaker, whatever that means, somebody who spent a lot of time perfecting the art of creating really high production value content for companies. I see the acceptance of audiences to consume content that is captured well on a webcam or a phone and that's where we are now and I'm totally here for it and try my best for a company the way all rounded. Coming back to present day then at Wistia, what are all the different types of content and video, maybe particularly, but wider content discussion that you deal with I guess on a daily basis? What is the output of Wst? I know that you have all sorts of things going on, you do webinars in a really interesting way. Talk me through I guess what your content stack is and how you approach that.

Yeah, and you mentioned this with Wistia. I'm still relatively new. I've been here a year and a half and I feel like there is a real, Wistia has a really strong history of content and so I feel like a very strong responsibility to hold up that

No pressure,

That bar, that bar is really high. And I think one of the things that, what I think about our content very broadly is we have a good understanding of who we're talking to. We are talking to in general to people who are the video producer or responsible for making video at a business that is our audience. And we know that audience well and we know we have a really solid tone that we're also locked into, which is like we want everything to be simple and easy to digest and easy to consume and we want to offer advice that's very helpful and tactical based on what you're trying to accomplish. So when I think about our brand voice and what we're trying to be, it's like I imagine when you go to a hardware store and you don't know what you're doing and you talk to some old ass guy with the apron on and he's like, you don't want that, you want this thing.
They're super knowledgeable, super knowledgeable, and they just tell it to you straight, no fluff, no flourish, but it's just good advice. So to me, one of my jobs is are we maintaining that standard on every piece of content that we're putting out there? Yes, Wist is fun, Wist is super fun, our brand is dope, we have really great times, but it's like my job is making sure we are always having that digestible, actionable information for our target audience. Then it's like how do we make those things come to life? For me, my main responsibilities are across three areas, our blog, our webinars and our research reports and guides. So it's like those are the three big things for us and video is also a huge part of it about how do we integrate video into blog post, how do we integrate video into other areas?
How do we use webinars and stuff like that? Those are my big content purviews of what I'm focused on and I think what I, like most marketers, I am attracted to views how many people are looking at our stuff and are the people who are looking at it, the people who are buying Wistia are going to buy our product. The challenge we face, you've sort of mentioned is Wistia is on a journey. We are known really well as a video hosting platform and I think when people think about video hosting platforms, we are within the top one or two, we're top two or three choices, but we are also a webinar platform that is a much more crowded space. We're trying to enter that we are an editing platform, we have a lot of integrations with other things and so it's like for us, I think we have to start creating and getting content and getting attention into these other areas that the product is evolving into.
And the exciting and challenging thing for Listia for me on the content side is our product is evolving really, really fast and I have limited resources and so I to have a lot of content and a lot it is a lot of what we try and deal with is just focus, where do we focus, what content do we create and how do we make content that is really stellar and unique? And so an example for me of a piece of content that I think is unique was last year we made a printed guidebook. It's a mediaeval webinar wizard themed guidebook for webinars. And when I think about that, it's like we really recognise that people are stressed out when they have webinars and as somebody who hosted webinars, I did not want this to be lost. It's on your computer so you can't really use your computer when the webinar is happening.
Fundamentally, your information shouldn't really be on the same system that is necessarily running the webinar where you're going to be worried if you're going to share your screen and then some notes or mantras that say you got this accidentally show up, you want another thing. And so it was like, oh, let's build a book, let's make it super interesting. Let's tie it to this webinar wizard campaign. And it's like that I think was a really good example of Wistia content where it was like we knew this is talking exactly to the audience of people who make videos or webinars at businesses. We made sure the advice was really, really actionable. We dressed it up in this really fun way with a whole wizard vibe and stuff, but we didn't lose that tone and then we were really thoughtful about the delivery of it. We delivered it in a format that makes sense for solving the issue that you're running into.
You're stressed about webinars and so it's better if it's this side little book thing. And we really wanted to make little tweaks like, oh, there's little stickers and fun stuff in there as well. And so for us that I think for me is when I think about pieces of content or problems we're solving, it's like are we executing on all those different levels? Do we have the right voice? Is it speaking to the right person? Is it the right delivery? And it is something, is the branding and packaging it in really unique to Wistia? Could nobody else, nobody could do a webinar guidebook that's wizard themed, we're the oldie ones. No one else is touching this. You know what I mean? So that felt like yes, that was whole. Rod worked really great.

I love that and I fully agree that yes, no one else could get away with it. I know a few things to pick up on in there. I know from seeing your co-founders, Chris and Brandon, Brenda, sorry, Brendan.

Yeah, Brenda,

They talk about how actually in terms of shipping product, you do that really quickly. There's short sprints of picking one thing and getting that out. I mean that must be a real challenge to keep up with in terms of telling the world about new products or new features. How do you adapt to that and what do you do differently to be that agile I guess as a content team?

Yeah, it is tough, but I'd much rather be, I try and focus that I would much rather be having that problem than not enough new stuff. You know what I

Mean? Yeah. I would rather static product be interesting. Yeah,

Yeah. It's more fun, but it is a huge thing. I think part of it is what makes Wistia really strong I think is a couple things. One, there is a very functional part which is we work in, we have trimesters, so instead of quarters we use trimesters four month periods. So we have these triannual business reviews and the way the Triannual business reviews work, and I think this is a very fantastic system that other companies could easily adopt or something like it. You go into the Triannual Business Review and all the major departments give you pre-reads what we're running into content and go to market, here's what the product is working on, here's what we're learning from customer feedback, here's what we're learning on the hiring side, all this other stuff, everybody reads the pre-reads and then kind of Tabor is planning over the next four months.
So oh, product says this part of the product is going really well. This part actually we're going to spend more time. So here's how the reprioritization works. So basically what ends up happening is you get out of these triannual business reviews and the goal is, and most oftentimes the case, you have very strong alignment between product, marketing, sales, customer service, and we are all like, this is the product, this is the message, this is the area. We're going to focus on this for four months and in four months we'll tell you how it went. And I think that is a huge part of what makes it able to have a fast product that's a evolving with being able to be adaptable is process. And I think people want to think it's cool artsy people just fly it out ideas all the time, but it's like we have a really good process. The other part that I think is key is huge trust. There is a massive amount of trust between different people that you're going to do good.
One of the things that we've said is that Wistia, we are not, this isn't, we're not a teaching hospital. Everybody here is good. You know what I mean? So everybody is talented here. There's not that many employees at Wistia relative to how long we've been around, but it's like the talent level is really high. We have a lot of freelancers and independent contractors that we've worked with for years that we're able to pull into different projects. And so it's like that trust, that bench of external talent that can help us and that ability that we've done a lot of this stuff before is so helpful because I think if you look at companies with high degrees of turnover where people haven't been there for years, it is like there might be a top level process, but unless there are people who have experienced and gone through it, it doesn't always run as smooth. And so I think that's something that's a really strong part of whiskey as culture.

I love that it's a team that have played together for a long time and can read each other's move and crucially trust each other because they've been through all of that together in the past. I love it. You mentioned one of the three things was reports you recently had, is it the state of video report? Is that what titled? Yes. State video report. Can we dive into that a little bit? Just some of the maybe headline things that came out of that report? Just yeah, tell me a little bit about what you discovered and what it was.

Yeah, the state of video report is awesome. Everybody should check out. Wistia has been doing it for like five years now or so, and basically there's say it's evolved every year, but here are kind of the basics of it. The first is we look at data across our platform. So we host millions of videos from tens of thousands of businesses and we analyse all that data about videos on your website, average engagement rates, play rates, all this other stuff. We run all those transcripts through ai. We categorise video so we can talk about what's the best play rate for a how to video or what is the most engagement, how does engagement drop off as a video gets longer. We could answer all sorts of questions like that. And this year we had something new of platform data where we're like how the performance of a video change based on where on your website you put it, if it's on a contact page versus a homepage versus a product page, what is the different levels of engagement there?
So that's one set of data is platform data. The second set of data is basically survey data. So we go out, we survey hundreds and hundreds this year, 1,300 marketers or so about budgets. What are you concerned about? Are you using ai? And we try to ask a really tailored amount of questions to people. Then the last one is we bring in contributors other partner companies. This year we worked with super side large agency, we worked with SEMrush, we worked with Dropbox, we worked with speaking coaches, and so we get information to insights from them. And so we say, here's some data we saw from our platform, or here's some data we saw from a survey. What data do you have that backs up or refutes this or what do you think about that? And so those are the three core pieces, the headlines of stuff that I saw out of this year that I thought were really interesting. And this is not necessarily the headlines of what other people might find interesting. This is what I find interesting.
The first is a pretty obvious one that is a steady trend. More and more companies are producing videos. They have more both an increase in video producers and they have an increase in marketers who are making videos who are not video producers. So that was one. The kind of flip to that though is that doesn't mean agencies are less. It just is in the same way that having an in-house blogging team or an in-house writer actually generally means you need more agency help because you have a larger content programme you're trying to scale. So it's like to me, the video producers, the growing video producers in-house is like it is core part of a company's marketing strategy to have video and they are investing in that and they are doing that through headcount. And when you add headcount, you're saying this is a consistent thing we want to produce and we want video to adapt to log with us.
It's not one and done just with one ad or one testimonial. We want this to be a regular cadence. So one thing that really stuck out to me, the second thing that I think really stuck out to me from state of video was the engagement rate. Dropping engagement rate drops all the time every year, every year engagement rate steadily goes down. This year was the largest drop in engagement rate over the last five years because we could look at so much of this data when you break it down by what video type suffered the biggest engagement rate drop, it was short form, it was under five minute videos actually had the most substantial drop in engagement rate versus longer form videos. And I think that that is a really, really interesting thing because I don't buy that attention spans are shrinking. I just buy that your expectations are higher, and we see so many short form videos that my expectations of short form videos are very high.
And so it's like if I'm booking into a 20 or 30 minute webinar, I know what I'm getting into and I'm giving it the time. If a video is only a minute or two minutes and it's not good within 15 seconds, I'm like, I don't even want to bother. And it's like that is an interesting thing and I don't think my attention is short, it's just because my standard of quality is a lot higher for short videos and I don't necessarily mean production. I mean it just has to be interesting and engaging. The last thing that I'll call out is for the state of video that I think is super interesting is just AI usage. The entire section of AI is the hottest topic in video. And I think for me, the standout stat was the last year, I think it was 16% of people were using video in the video production process or using AI in the video production process, 16% we're using AI in the video production process.
This year it's over 40% with another 19% planning to use it by the end of the year. So you see this really, really big adoption of AI for the usage of video. I think what is also surprising is it is not what I thought. A lot of people are using video for scripting. A lot of people are using video for clipping. A lot of people are using video for captions. And so you realise, I think if you look on LinkedIn or you look on Twitter, it's like I'm a slap a fucking text prompt into this thing and I'm going to get a video out of it and it's amazing. And then everybody will be like, videographers are so cooked. Look at this. It's like these people are so screwed. Look at this. You know what I mean? But if you look at what video producer do,

You've been reading my posts.

Yeah, you, you're screwed. No, but it's like if you look at what most video producers are doing, it's, I think it's missing the story. Audio levelling takes probably hours. It could take hours to audio level. Now there are buttons where you press it in five minutes, you get levelled audio, like writing a script is probably the longest part of it, and some video producer might be given a blog post or an ebook from another marketing department and they'll say, make a video of this, and it's a huge pain in the ass. For them to take that piece of content and turn it into a script, they can get 70% of the way there by plugging it into something like Chap GPT and being like, write me a three minute script based on this. And so seeing where people were using video and where they were interested in using video, we're really interested to dubbing and language translation.
So it's one of the top two uses. Avatars are relatively low on the bottom, and so it's like you start to see there's a big discrepancy between what you see on social and what people who work in the field are doing. And I think to me, that was really the part of it that felt scary and scary. Like, oh my god, that's a lot of AI over the course of a short period of time. And then very uplifting in some ways, like no one's having fun doing a lot of these tasks. You know what I mean? No one has been like, oh, just got out of a great audio levelling session. I've never heard somebody say that.

Oh man, a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean I'm totally in the same place with it. We talked a little bit at the start about what we do. So much of it is really good use of ai. I've created a whole company around the efficient production of remote video, and that includes, and so all the ways that you just mentioned using AI in a really good way and combining that with human creativity and in our case, the professional last step as it were, or professional overview from high production background. But I am really glad to hear that the AI avatars are the bottom of the list. I think that's part of the AI story that I think I push back against the most. I feel like anyone that's using AI avatars in a front customer facing, almost sales environment is just throwing all the trust out the window.
If they're putting that out saying, this is our message, or these are our people and they're not real. Even if that's an avatar of an employee in your company still, there's something really disingenuous about that I think, and there's still soulless and there's still a whole trust that's missing there, which is so critical as part of the sales process I think, and that's the bit that I'm kind of clinging onto. My company's called Human Video. It's literally about creating content with real people for all of that. But I a hundred percent get, and I think that story of using AI in the production that's across all functions in businesses, not there's AI happening, especially in the sales side of things, but everything even in software engineering, that's a whole thing. That's a bit of an existential threat as well. I see a lot of that.
But also, yeah, it's fascinating. I think my, my LinkedIn feed is particularly full maybe of AI Doom possibly, but even this week we've had VO three from Google Live translation in Google teams, which look great. And you guys have had a brilliant AI functionality and translation like that as a whole game changer that you can, instead of just saying, I want to add some AI captions to this, and then an evolution of that was maybe I would like it in French and Spanish, but you're literally now saying, I would just like to listen to this video in French, but also the whole thing's changed. Lips are synced. Tell me a little bit about that. That's a wonderful use of ai from my point of view.

I think it's incredible, and I think people haven't really appreciated. I've been really into thinking about how many steps it took to get us here. It feels all of a sudden, but it's not. It's been a while where even just getting a transcript of a video, I think for me, I was talking with the chief technical officer for three play media, which does a lot of stuff in accessibility and does a lot of stuff for dubbing and captions and stuff along videos. And he just brought up, we were talking about if you wanted a transcript originally a couple of years ago of a video, you have to outsource it to a human person and it's a 24 hour turnaround, which isn't that bad. It's super efficient but still a while and it costs a decent amount, and so it just didn't make sense to get transcripts for every single video.
Then all of a sudden AI comes along. It's a lot easier to get those transcripts. They're like 60%, then they're 70%, then they're 80%, then they're 90%, now they're like 99%. They're fucking great. All of a sudden you go one step further and you go, okay, there's now a whole parallel set of technology for translating text from one language to another, colloquial phrases, understanding specific terms in different languages, that technology goes in parallel. Now all of a sudden you have voice technology, okay, great, we can make an AI voice, but can you make an AI voice? That sounds like my voice. Okay, wow, that's crazy. That's another parallel technology. And then all of a sudden it's like, can you edit a video? Can you edit one portion like my lips? Okay, that's another parallel piece. And then just one day it's like boom, they all click together and you can do this amazing day where you just press a button and your video is all of a sudden you speaking a different language.
And for Wistia, I think it's something that is really exciting because we're a hosting platform, so we embed a lot of videos on people's websites. And one of the things that's really cool about that is we also get data about browsers, what language your browser is set in. And so when you go to dub a video at Wistia, it shows you the percent of your audience that likely is speaking that language. So it's like, oh, this homepage video, did you know that 5% of your audience is French and that 5% of the audience might want to see this video in French? Okay, great. You dub it in French. Now the second somebody who's French goes on your website, that video is instantly playing in French. You know what I mean? It's like all these little points of friction are just removed and you could do something that's so amazing.
And I think from my experience back at HubSpot, we had this show called Skill Up and the show was one season, one host, and it was about a specific topic. And I noticed at one point that the Skill Up show was within the top charts in marketing in most Spanish speaking countries. It was like top 50. And I was like, this isn't English, it's not meant for this. If we gave all the scripts for this show and just made them in Spanish, this would do well. And then they did, and they just took the show and they poured it over to a Spanish version eventually, and it's like, it did do better than the English version. Now we could just be running shows like this. Oh great. We work with one of our customers. It's like they have a lot of clients in Germany, they're an American company, they're in Somerville over here.
Great. Now they can dub content in German sweet way easier if you're a sales rep. When I was in a lot of the times when I was in HubSpot and they were moving internationally, going into new markets, you would've American sales reps try to sell into France. And all of a sudden your first, imagine how much different that conversation would be if your first communication to them is a video where you're speaking French and you could even be like, this is a dub video. This is a thing that little bit opens up markets for you. And so when I think about those couple of use cases where it's like a sales or a CS rep sending a personalised video that's dubbed in the language and the person they're receiving it, that's very top of funnel, very useful. When I think about shows or content like scale up, how much you can take that content and switch it into another language and how easy that is and how much a more reach that gives you, that's a really great win.
When I think about it as you have that person who then gets down and they're on your website and you can instantly change the video to their native language, okay, great, now they're moving down the funnel. What if I do that to demo videos? And so I just feel like when it comes to dubbing, we are on the cusp of, there is a lot of companies that could take huge advantage of this and have an unfair advantage getting to market internationally. They're able to move to different markets a lot more effectively, and they can do it in a way that isn't a whole new process. It's like the videos they have, the content they have, the sales process they have, but tweaking it a little bit so that it's a little more localised. And so I think that's just an opportunity that we're really coming to terms with and it's like, I don't think people have fully caught on to it yet, but I think it's something that you're going to see a lot of companies focusing on the dubbing side and a lot of the companies thinking of video is my primary and core asset.
How do I bring this asset to other areas? How do I get this thing, how do I get miles out of this so that we're reaching new markets and that we're getting in front of people before our competitors are

A hundred percent. I totally feel like it's massively underutilised. People aren't even seeing it coming. I think yet the more content that these companies that are selling to the whole world or could be, and maybe as they're growing, they're not going into certain markets because they don't feel like they have, there is literally a language barrier. And to be able to flick a switch and suddenly say, actually, we want to at least present our product to billions of other potential customers. And if it's a SaaS product and you're just already set up to serve anyone in the world, in any region, that's an amazing opportunity. And I am really fortunate to have travelled a lot. I've been in the back of taxis with Google Translate on my phone and I'm like, oh, listen to that. And typing, trying to communicate something and seeing that live, that Google Teams live translation was a real moment for me I think as well that really authentic live human to human conversation just happening.
And I've worked with hundreds of translators all around the world and that's a whole thing as well. But yeah, I'm really excited to see what happens to that. I love making the world again, remote production company, making the world a smaller place is really exciting. And I just thought it was wonderful that you had that first as far as I could see, you were ahead of that and that was really important in terms of your product roadmap. That was really, really cool. And I want to dive into that more just coming into land, Sam, there's this podcast called human marketing. I'm just wondering what kind of final thoughts do you have for the different ways that video can be used in a really human way on the kind of buyer's journey for any business really, particularly focusing on a B2B world and for this audience?

So I think video is something that we see everywhere. We see all types of videos, everything from we make product ads, explainer videos, brand awareness, demos, customer follow up. We've made videos that are just like, Hey, you should take this survey. We make a lot of videos. Please take this survey video is great. And it's like we have so many of those. And I think when people are trying to make more human videos, I think a lot of people struggle with the writing portion of it where the scripting and the writing comes across very stilted and difficult and not normal. They basically try and translate trying to say a product marketing page as a video, and it's like

No human has ever done.

Yeah, it's just a way that we don't talk. And so I think for one situation, for a lot of people to make more human videos, when I started appearing on videos or producing a podcast or things like that, somebody had given me advice relatively early where they're like, if you are in a room with people, they're acting normal. If you pick up a camera and point it at them and say, act normal, they just start doing weird stuff. You know what I mean? The hands go, they're like, their face is weird. They'll talk weird. You can't be in front of a camera and things would be normal. It's not possible, but you can kind of reverse it if you step back and go like, okay, the normal conversation, normal script wouldn't start like this, I would've just list off these five things in this way.
I would have weird fluctuations in my voice because that's how I naturally talk. So if I find myself talking and it just sounds like I'm talking like this, that is wrong. My voice goes up and down when I'm talking to people. And so I think for general advice of making video or things like that is right from the perspective of talking, just you have to be able to say it first before anything else. And the other thing is do not always walk or try and edit out or try and smooth over every issue. If there's something weird about you, I have a lot of weird ticks. I move in sometimes weird ways. My voice fluctuates up and down. Don't fight every strange thing because people can feel you holding back a little bit or trying things. And so the more that you're just like, okay, I am understanding the things that are part of my normal day-to-day speech pattern, and I'm not going to try and iron them out, I'm just going to try and make myself clear in my point to be understood, but I'm not going to try and dull or change my personality.
And so I think generally what people should be really focused on is that natural way of talking is trying to reverse engineer a natural way of talking. Think about it, and then being able to recognise when you're not doing it. And the more you get better at that, the more real and authentic and human your videos will be. One thing also I'll say, if you can't do that, if you get nervous thinking about yourself, make up a version of yourself that you think would be better. So for me, my version of myself in a lot of videos is I think about the guy who guesses people's weight at a carnival. I imagine I'm that person and in my head, that's why sometimes on videos I'll be like, Hey, let's going on. You need to do this because that is the version in my head that I'm playing. I have that version and that idea or like a WE announcer. So I would say if you be authentic and understanding your own character, if that's a little bit scary or different, make up somebody new and try and act like that person temporarily and see if that's any better.

I love that Everything I've ever done in the commercial world, even back to 15 years ago, has often been achieved by just sitting people down. Having a camera off to the side and having a conversation and getting the messaging that you're after in a commercial setting is actually more difficult in that way than just sitting down and creating a script that legal we're happy with and that hits all the points, but the resulting content is so much more authentic. You're literally just having a chat with somebody. And that's still what we do. Everything we create is just jumping on a call with a remote producer and having a conversation and drawing out really great, honest, authentic content. And I absolutely love that. That's what you jumped on there. It's brilliant. Sam has been fab. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything you want to point people towards? How can people find you? How can people find the state of video report and find out more about Wistia in?

Yeah, so if you want to find out about me, I probably post or most active on LinkedIn, you just, I'm just Sam Balter on LinkedIn, and if you want to find the state video report, wistia.com/data of video, it's amazing. It's tonnes and tonnes of stats, tonnes of useful information in there. If you want to find out about Wistia, obviously just type wistia.com. And I would highly encourage everybody to mess around with the dumping feature. It is so fun to see yourself speaking another language. So test it out, try it, see how you can use it. And otherwise, if you have any questions, I'm a very easy to responsive person, just reach out to me on LinkedIn and happy to connect or talk about anything that you're curious about.

I love that. Thank you. I'll include links to all of those things in the show notes, including hopefully to the amazing webinar that you did

Wrapping up. Oh shit. Yeah, we didn't even talk about the webinar. That thing was a monster.

It was the best webinar I've ever seen. Genuinely. I mean, the key thing really quickly on it was that it just kept bouncing or certainly had a big prerecorded element that absolutely felt like a monster in terms of hilarious creative ways to communicate the findings and then a live element or multiple live elements in it. It was fabulous.

Yeah, that was my Magnus opus at this company. Yeah, that part. Well, because it's like I took over season Sounds arrived. Yeah, see the video live and I was like, oh my God, let's go make on this. And so the whole planning process of it is a nightmare and it's super fun. But yeah, it's very fun to be coming up working on these segments. And I was like, desk host, and it's like putting it all together. I dunno. It's a really, really fun one. I'm really strong on the belief of pre-recording content for webinars. That's a whole other topic. If anybody wants to talk about that, hit me up.

That'll be a whole other episode of the podcast, epic Webinars with Sam Bolter. Sam, thank you so much for your time. It's been a great chat. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.