Turning our promotions report into a video with an AI presenter
I turned our full-year promotions report into a two-and-a-half-minute video, presented by one of Synthesia's stock avatars.
The FMCG Promo Pulse is our look at how brands and retailers in Malaysia ran their promotions compared with the year before. For its first few years it was a PDF on the Intrack website. Since we redid our insights page in September, each edition also has its own article there.
Either way it’s something you read, and I’ve been looking at whether the reports our clients get could be videos instead. The full-year 2023 Promo Pulse, which went up last Friday, is one of those experiments.
The video is two and a half minutes long. A presenter talks through the year’s main trends while the key points come up beside them and captions run along the bottom. The presenter is one of Synthesia’s stock avatars. To me it looks uncanny, though at one point it’s believable, and I think the team was impressed.
Video from a script
We’d put one video on the insights page before. In October, an article on the rice price hike came with a 31-second bar chart race showing which rice brands had run the most promotions over five years. It’s quick to take in, but it’s one chart, and nobody talks you through it.
The Promo Pulse has a lot more in it, with a headline trend and then a section for each department. Made the usual way, that would mean one of us presenting it on camera, then recording and editing again every time a figure changed.
Synthesia, a London company, turns text into video instead. When it raised its Series C last June it had about 140 stock avatars and could speak more than 120 languages. You pick a presenter, write what they should say scene by scene, and it generates the voice and the lip movement to match. It can also make a custom avatar of a real person, but that was in another paid tier, so we went with a stock one.
At the end of January Synthesia added an AI video assistant, which is what we used. You give it a document, it drafts a script and lays it out as scenes, and you edit from there.
Because everything is generated from the script, changing the video means editing text and rendering it again, without recording anything. The version we published is already the second one, and the video and the article went up the same afternoon.
From 800 words to 330
The script started from the write-up we’d already prepared for the article, which runs to about 800 words. We used ChatGPT to cut it down to about 330, which works out to two and a half minutes of speech, and the assistant laid that out as scenes.
Most of what went was numbers. The video keeps figures for just two things: digital media promotions rising from 5.18% in 2022 to 20.86% in 2023, and the SST increase to 8% in March. Each got a panel of its own.
Everything else was cut down to which way things went. The article lists how far promotions fell for detergent, dishwashing agent and multipurpose cleaner, and notes that liquid cleansers went up. The video keeps only its summary, “a decline in promotional activities across all categories”, so the liquid cleansers never come up. The chilled and frozen section was dropped completely, the inflation forecast became “projected inflation increases”, and the news sources the article cites went too.
What was left became scenes beside the presenter, either a heading with a short list or a single line on a coloured panel.
The captions are burned into the video, and on one of the list scenes they sit on top of the last point, so “New retail marketing standards” is half hidden behind them.
The video now sits at the top of the Promo Pulse article. Like the article, it ends by pointing you to the full report, which is where the numbers are.