The Most Effective Advertising Format Right Now is Short Videos. However, Anyone Can Shoot Long Videos – It’s Enough to Know How to Press a Button on a Phone 😉 But How to Turn This Raw Material into Short Effective Clips? Yes, AI Can Help with This. But There’s an Important Nuance that This Startup Managed to Incorporate into Their Platform. Here’s the Essence of the Nuance.
Project Essence
You’re already making great videos, now make them work for you,” suggests Munch.
For example, you recorded an interview with an interesting person for your podcast. But now you need to attract as many viewers as possible.
What’s the easiest way to do this? Cut short clips from the long interview and use them to promote your podcast on social networks. This is exactly what you can do with Munch, but spending tens of times less time and effort than if you were doing it manually.
For this, you need to upload your long video to the platform, and Munch’s AI will analyze the video and sound track, automatically extracting short clips with the most impressive scenes from the long video.
Moreover, the platform knows the video formats accepted in popular social networks, so it will trim the clips to fit each network’s format. But in a smart way – keeping the most important scene elements in the middle of the frame, whether it’s a vertical video for TikTok, a square for Reels, or a wide format for YouTube.
There is also a video editor on the platform where you can manually tweak the automatically generated clips – trim to an unusual format, add subtitles, overlay text blocks and images on the picture, and so on.
Professional content creators are already really using the Munch platform. And now the startup has raised its first investment of $7.2 million.
What’s Interesting
Munch is not the only platform that has learned to cut short, impactful clips from long videos.
I wrote about the startup GlossAi with a similar platform that can cut short clips from long audio and video recordings. At that time, they raised $8 million in their first round of investment. Since then, the platform has significantly matured, no longer resembling a minimum viable product, and, according to the startup, is already being used by 10,000 companies. So the theme, in general, has very good demand.
However, today’s Munch has an important feature that advantageously distinguishes their platform from similar ones.
The popularity of a clip on social media is not “hanging in the air.” You can’t just cut an impressive, in our view, clip and hope that it will take off. You need to “hit the trend” – the fashionable theme, hashtag, musical accompaniment, or some other feature that is trendy right now in that social network. Today one thing is fashionable, and tomorrow something else will be.
Munch is capable of analyzing current trends in popular social networks to cut from a long video not just effective clips, but clips that fit today’s trend. Moreover, it is possible that for TikTok, the platform will suggest using one clip, and for LinkedIn, a completely different one. And tomorrow it will already suggest something else, as trends may have changed.
Munch can not only cut effective short clips, but also automatically create captions for them. For each social network, the platform will generate different captions – in different styles and with different hashtags, to fit the general communication style adopted in a given social network and current trends. It is unlikely that a post written in the style of TikTok will take off in LinkedIn, and in TikTok, written in the style of LinkedIn 😉
Videos have now become the most popular format for posts and advertising in social networks. And these videos can be generated not only from your own long content, which we want to attract viewers and listeners to. User reviews are also good content for advertising videos. Of course, if you manage to make such videos short and effective too.
The startup Orson uses a similar technology to Munch and GlossAi, but to create video reviews of users. The AI of the platform independently contacts users of the client’s product in video mode and asks them questions about the product – after which it again independently edits the relatively long video material into short clips with effective user reviews about the product.
Where to Run
The rise in video popularity has led to the need for everyone to create an immense number of short video clips.
For example, Viddy claims that landing pages with short videos about the product convert much better into purchases than ordinary e-commerce websites. And therefore, it has created a platform for creating such landing pages.
But this means that every online store now needs to create thousands of clips advertising each product sold. Doing this manually can be an overwhelming task 🙁
But this is where the startup Oxolo, which I wrote about in October, can help. It has created a platform to which you can send a link to a product page – and the platform’s AI will automatically create a short video in which a digital character will tell about the most convincing features of the product. This startup raised 13 million euros in its first round of investment.
So the general direction of movement is the development of platforms for creating short videos.
This direction is now so in demand that even “ordinary” programs using AI to simplify the process of manually creating short videos from phone footage are receiving investments. An example is Ozone which I wrote about this month. Their video editor is still in beta testing, but they managed to raise $7.1 million in one round.
In general, there are many options for specific actions within one general direction of creating short video clips. I didn’t even mention online education, where the theme of microlearning is literally booming – for which you also need to learn how to create short video lessons from long lectures, which experts like to perform out of habit 😉
So all that’s left is to choose exactly what you want to do in this theme and who you can initially copy 😉
About the Company
Munch
Website: getmunch.com
Last Round: $7.2M, 11/21/2023
Total Investment: $7.2M, rounds: 1