Celtra Video Editor

Context

Company: Celtra
Timeframe: 2015 - 2016
Role: Director of Product

Mobile devices becoming the predominant screen for watching content had an enormous impact on the video industry. As budgets began rapidly shifting, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and every other video platform started announcing new video ad products on a quarterly basis. Meanwhile, brands realized their expensive TV ads are being skipped and scrolled-past long before the product makes its appearance.

Mission

A massive opportunity opened up for whoever would concoct how to make video ads that perform well in this alternate reality of watching on a vertical screen, with sound off, while rapidly scrolling through app news feed timelines.

Contributions

I led the project through research and development of a minimal viable product, its roll-out, launch, and beyond, reporting directly to the CPO.

• Conducted product discovery analysis of thousands of video ads to determine what drives performance on mobile.
• Developed production methodology for adapting TV ads to silent vertical video ads designed for mobile UX by experimenting with video ads.
• Devised a product strategy based on creative requirements, competitor analysis, and SWOT analysis.
• Designed a video editor web app specialized for adaptation.
• Designed an outstream video player and ad formats specifications for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
• Recruited partner customers and supervised Alpha pilot campaigns.
• Co-wrote masterclass content with Paddy Bird — a renowned editor and founder of Inside The Edit.
• Presented the product at launch events in San Francisco, LA, New York, and London.

Results

Video completion rate: 80% lift
Product validation: Partnership with Kargo
Industry impact: Attracted 700+ professionals from Google, Vice, NYT, The Guardian, NBC Universal, Twitter, et al.

"Celtra's new mobile technology is born from consumer insights and is perfectly merging media and creative. The campaign performance exceeded expectations by far—achieving results 80% above industry benchmarks."
— Giovanni Perosino, Head of Marketing Communication, Audi

Highlights

Data from thousands of campaigns running on Celtra’s platform and reports from other industry leaders pointed in the same direction: videos that perform well on mobile are short, vertical, and able to convey the message without sound. The opposite of classic video.

We set out to investigate if 30-second-long, widescreen, and sound-reliant TV ads could be adapted for the mobile context.

Re-framing the problem

Turning landscape video to portrait isn't as straightforward as cropping a photo. To ideally position a moving subject, each frame needs to be cropped differently. The solution lay in the old pan-and-scan technique used to adapt widescreen films for television. Not easy, but doable.

Long story short

Changing duration is an entirely different story. In most cases, image is inseparable from the sound. Re-editing the original would require professional video editing software and expertise that are beyond our target user’s know-how. There was no way we could make this part simpler.

Breaking the sound barrier

Our analysis revealed that over 90% of users have devices in silent mode, and most publishers autoplay videos with sound off. The finding begged the question whether bundling audio with image still made sense. By removing sound from the picture, we could make editing simple enough for anyone to do and significantly reduce ad loading time. The narration and dialogue could be replaced with title cards, motion graphics, and subtitles. The result would be a new format that sits between GIF and full-fledged video. Silent Film 2.0.

These findings became the foundation of the product strategy:

1. Brands are unlikely to pay for two separate shoots (landscape for TV and vertical for digital) — one-size-fits-all approach is more likely to succeed.
2. Video needs to be shot in landscape but directed so that the subject can always be framed within a 9:16 vertical format.
3. Audio is nice to have; the video should be able to fully communicate its content without sound (silent-first progressive enhancement).

Making the impossible possible

The first miracle was achieving video autoplay, which all mobile browsers restricted at the time. Users needed to tap on a thumbnail to initiate play with the OS-native player. Because of that, mobile video ads were available only inside video content inventory.

Celtra’s engineering team achieved a breakthrough by recompiling the MPEG-2 video decoder to JavaScript. This innovation opened up the door to bring desktop video banners to mobile and enable web publishers to compete with native apps for video budgets.

The video had to be low bit-rate, though, which meant heavy compression, which wrecked text rendering, often to the point of illegibility. So we designed the player to render motion graphics as HTML+CSS title cards stitched between footage clips into a continuous play experience. This enabled sharp text and faster loading times.

The second miracle was developing a full-fledged video editor application running in the browser for an integrated production of such ads. It had to be simple enough for amateurs to be proficient with it yet powerful enough to cover as many adaptation use-cases as possible.

It’s impossible to say whether ours was the first of its kind, but we haven’t come across one before despite conducting extensive market research.

Pilot experiments

Before committing to a long and expensive development of the video editor app, we decided to validate the creative approach and ad formats with selected customers. If that fails, everything fails. If it works, there’s a chance the success would persuade other advertisers to give the unusual a try.

We deployed the early ad-serving back-end, developed the player front-end, and executed the creative production as a managed service using Adobe Creative Suite to simulate the end result.

“Audi sees 80pc higher completion rate with vertical mobile video ads”
— Mobile Marketer

“Celtra’s new mobile technology is born from consumer insights and is perfectly merging media and creative. The campaign performance exceeded expectations by far – achieving results 80% above industry benchmarks”
— Giovanni Perosino, Head of Marketing Communication, Audi

Roll-out and launch

I worked closely with product marketing and customer success teams by educating, evangelizing, and producing content for pitch decks and webinars.

At the end of 2015, Celtra and Kargo announced a partnership:

“We are really only at the beginning of what can be done in mobile. Mobile is not another screen, it is an entirely different content experience. Reshaping the video experience from a mobile-first perspective will change advertising dramatically — from how agencies and brands produce concepts to how advertising is executed to what the consumer experiences —and that is exciting.”
— Harry Kargman, founder and CEO of Kargo

In May 2016, Celtra officially launched the product with The Art of Short Form Video Creation event, which toured in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London. It featured a masterclass workshop by Paddy Bird — a world-renowned video editor and founder of Inside The Edit.

The event attracted over 700 media professionals from Google, Vice, The New York Times, The Guardian, Hearst, MediaCom, NBC Universal, Time Inc, Twitter, Shazam, Foursquare, and others.

Aftermath

Mobile browsers eventually enabled native video autoplay, which made the proprietary video player obsolete.

Creative adaptation also faced obstacles. Most of Celtra’s customers at the time were publishers who struggled to obtain brand approval for re-editing video creatives. Unlocking the potential required a direct relationship with marketers and the blessing of post-production studios, which we started to explore with adjacent R&D projects.

With product adoption not hitting expected targets at the time of other initiatives requiring all-hands, the company decided to place its bets elsewhere, and the product was eventually discontinued.

Credits

Engineering: A. Kmetec, G. Dodig, R. Burgar, M. Uršič, B. Vizjak, S. Jazbar, A. Semiprimožnik, Ž. Tartara, D. Božidar, et al.
Product management: D. Rožac, M. Zegarelli, L. Dong
Product design: A.R. Urankar, D. Kužnik
Data analysis: L. Karelis
Product marketing: V. B. Brzin, Ž. Cotman, T. U. Mosquera, A. Benulič, Š. Buda, B. Jurjavčič, et al.