How we personalised newsreel videos for industry events

Do you want to create personalised videos for your audience that are relevant, engaging, and data-driven? Do you want to do it quickly and easily without any coding or editing skills?

If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you. In this article, we'll show you how to create personalised videos with Shotstack and Make, two powerful platforms that when combined, let you create videos using data, templates, and third party APIs.

We'll show you how we used Shotstack and Make to create a personalised newsreel video for each attendee of an industry event. Each video showcased relevant news, insights, and recommendations based on the attendee's preferences and data. Each video was unique and automatically generated and sent to the attendee every morning of the event.

What is Shotstack?

Shotstack is a cloud-based video editing platform that lets you create videos using code, data, and templates. You can use Shotstack to create videos for marketing, social media, e-commerce, education, and more.

With Shotstack, you can:

• Create videos from any data source, such as spreadsheets, databases, APIs, or user inputs
• Use templates to design your video layout, style, and effects
• Add merge fields to customise any element of your video, such as text, images or audio
• Render your videos in the cloud and download them or stream them to any device

Shotstack is easy to use and flexible. You can use Shotstack's web-based video editor; Studio, to create your video templates using drag and drop tools. You can also use Shotstack's API to create your videos programmatically using JSON or SDKs.

What is Make?

Make is a no-code platform that lets you build workflows to automate tasks and connect different apps and services. You can use Make to create workflows for marketing, sales, operations, customer service, and more.

With Make, you can:

• Drag and drop blocks to build your workflow logic
• Connect to hundreds of apps and services, such as HubSpot, Gmail, Google Sheets, and more
• Trigger actions based on events, schedules, or conditions
• Monitor and manage your workflows from a dashboard

Make is simple and powerful. You can use Make's block builder to create your workflow logic without writing any code. You can also use Make's connectors to integrate with various apps and services without any coding or configuration.

How we created personalised videos with Shotstack and Make

Our goal was to create a personalised "newsreel" video for each attendee of an industry event that would showcase relevant news, insights, and recommendations based on their data. We wanted to make each video unique and engaging for the individual.

Here are the steps we followed to create our personalised videos:

Step 1: Create a video template in Shotstack Studio

We started by creating a video template in Shotstack Studio. The Studio is a web-based video editor that lets you design your video layout, style, and effects using drag and drop tools.

We added different elements to our template, such as text boxes, images, audio tracks, and transitions. We also added merge fields where we wanted to insert personalised content. For example, we added merge fields for the recipient's name, city, favourite food, preferred type of news, favourite form of entertainment, etc...

Step 2: Build a registration form in HubSpot

Next, we built a registration form in HubSpot where attendees could sign up for their daily newsreel. We asked the attendees to provide the following information:

• Their name
• Their city
• Their favourite food
• Their preferred type of news
• Their favourite form of entertainment

Step 3: Construct a workflow in Make

Then, we constructed a workflow in Make that would bring together the data from the registration form, external data sources, and Shotstack to create the personalised video.

We used Make's block builder to create our workflow logic. We connected different blocks to perform different actions and functions. Here's an overview of our workflow:

• Trigger: We used the HubSpot trigger to start our workflow when a new contact was created in HubSpot.
• Data: We used the Data block to store the contact information from the registration form as variables.
• Weather: We used WeatherAPI.com to get the weather information for both Las Vegas (where the event was held) and the contact's home city.
• News: We used Newsdata.io to get a relevant article from that day that matched the contact's preferred type of news.
• Summary: We used OpenAI GPT to summarise the long-form article into highlights that would fit into the video.
• Restaurant: We used Yelp API to get a relevant restaurant in Las Vegas that matched the contact's favourite food. We only selected restaurants with a rating of 4 stars or higher on Yelp.
• Entertainment: We used Ticketmaster API to get a relevant event in Las Vegas that matched the contact's favourite form of entertainment.
• Gif: We used Giphy API to get a random gif because, who doesn't love a gif
• Video: We used the Shotstack block to send the data from the previous blocks to Shotstack for processing and creating the personalised video. We specified the template ID, the merge fields, and the output format.
• Email: We used the Gmail block to send an email to each contact containing a link to their landing page where they could view their video.

Step 4: Email and monitor the videos

Finally, we emailed and monitored the videos that were created by our workflow. Each morning, we triggered our workflow to run and create a new batch of personalised videos for each contact.

We used Make's dashboard to track the status and performance of our workflow. We could see how many videos were created, how long they took, and if there were any errors or issues.

We also used HubSpot's dashboard to track the engagement and feedback of our contacts. We could see how many emails were opened, clicked, and replied.

We received fantastic responses from the attendees who received the daily "newsreel" videos. It's sparked a lot of interest from broadcasters around the world, to see how they can use Shotstack to generate personalised newsreels for their audience.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post that showed you one way that you create custom videos with Shotstack. We showed you how easy it is to bring together your first-party data, existing assets, and assets from third parties to create thousands of bespoke, data-driven videos in minutes.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can sign up for a free account with Shotstack and Make today. You can also check out our documentation and learn articles for more guidance and inspiration.

We'd love to hear what you think, and how you could use similar videos in your organisation.