User-Generated Video And The Battle For Audience Trust
By Jon Cornwell, Newsflare CEO
Reality drives relatability
The power of user-generated video (UGV) lies in its ability to connect us with the world from the point of view of someone just like us. Video of a child from the POV of a loving parent is relatable because it could just as easily be any one of us holding the camera. That the clip was captured on a smartphone similar to the one with which we're viewing the clip, adds to the feeling of authenticity. However, the relatability of UGV depends on the clip being real.
The benefits of AI
Though there is good reason to be cautious about an explosion of generative AI in the creative industries, the benefits of AI in video are plentiful. Digital video stabilisation, accelerated production workflows, automated formatting for different platforms, next-level search experiences and adding AI-generated voiceovers to videos that previously wouldn't have benefited from them. All of these AI-powered capabilities serve to benefit the viewer by making higher production values more achievable for a wider universe of people.
The unwilling suspension of belief
However, that relatability vanishes when we start to doubt whether what we are looking at is real or not. It is an unwelcome state of affairs when we start with doubt. Rather than the willing suspension of disbelief that we deploy when we are watching content that is explicitly fictional, say a Marvel movie or a Pixar film, we are increasingly less confident whether content that purports to be real is actually real or whether it has been AI-generated. What we now feel is the unwilling suspension of belief.
Newsflare's unique position
Operating a marketplace for user-generated content/video (UGC/V), the team at Newsflare sits at the centre of a digital video ecosystem, where the gods worshipped are those of trust and engagement, and the currency is captioned video. We can attest that trickery in the battle for attention is nothing new. Over the years, we have become adept at identifying and rooting out the tricks deployed to sell more video. These range from the straightforward theft of content for personal financial gain, the use of aftereffects to add an exotic creature to an unlikely location (e.g. a dolphin swimming in the River Seine, Paris), and frequently the reposting of a clip of a weather event of the past, purporting it to be today's news.
Scale is worthless without value.
Whilst news agencies and outlets work hard to ensure that their output is never misleading, for the worlds of marketing and entertainment, it is more nuanced. When seduced by the promise of huge efficiencies and massive scale from the use of GenAi in their outputs, one consideration should be at the forefront of mind: will customers feel a net benefit from the use of this exciting new technology? Because when customers have a reasonable expectation that what they are looking at is real, their loyalty to your brand will not increase if they later discover that they have been duped. As we have seen over the course of this week as the furore over the unlabelled but suspected use of Ai in a promotional video published to YouTube by Will Smith. Trust is slowly built but quickly burnt - reach is of questionable worth if the way in which it is achieved also diminishes brand value.
