Sell your next event with attendee videos

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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Martech Podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show we have the one and only, it’s Mr. Dan Gable from Shout Out. Mate, how you doing today?
Dan:
Yeah, good, Lee, how are you?
Lee:
I am tip top and champion and very excited to talk with you today, buddy. For the folks who don’t know you, could you give us a little bit of a quick bio about yourself and maybe something that not many people know about yourself?
Dan:
Sure. Quick bio. So it’s not so quick, because that I’ve been making content for nearly 40 years, if you can believe that. Started off in TV, then worked in post production, then set up a production company, so did tonnes of music videos, corporate videos and event videos, and then founded Shout Out, because I could really see that there’s an easier way to make videos, a faster and easier way. So that’s really where Shout Out came about.
Lee:
And is there anything cool that people might not know about you? Are you, for example, an international spy?
Dan:
I wish. No, I just worked on tonnes of TV shows. Like Big Brother, Top Gear. That’s really cool.
Lee:
I would have started with that.
Dan:
I would have to remember the Word. I spent most of my youth hanging out, working on shows called The Word and Games Master, which TV was very different then and it was a lot more fun.
Lee:
I kind of long for those days. And then for Shout Out. What is Shout Out?
Dan:
In a nutshell, so in a nutshell, so Shout Out kind of reverses the video making process, if you’d like. What you do is you build it’s a SaaS system, it’s a piece of software, you build a branding template, first of all, so that’s an intro and Outro screen overlay kind of name caption, details, et cetera. And then you can send links to people just URLs to record videos, or you can record yourself using a URL. And Shoutout will brand up the video or combine it with your template and create it automatically. So the big advantages really are it’s super fast. I know I’ve done like hundreds of event videos and it’s really difficult to get these kind of highlight videos out at the end of the day. But with Shoutout, you can literally make a video, it’s branded up and available in seconds, that can be shared very easily and quickly. So imagine it’s a bit like the idea behind it. It’s a bit like the old TV outside broadcast truck. So you’ve got a little dashboard where all the videos appear and you could have multiple links, people recording videos, and your marketing or social media manager can just be sitting on that dashboard, the videos turn up and they can get shared immediately.
Dan:
And we can use things like AI to write the social posts and all sorts of clever stuff like that.
Lee:
That’s pretty cool. Well, for those who are listening to the show and also watching on YouTube. We will actually get to see a little bit of a demo later on. So if you’re listening to the audio podcast, be sure to cheque out the show notes and there will be a link with a timestamp to the video for you to go and check that out. But let’s have a deeper conversation just about video and events in particular. My own experience of you guys was actually using the Shout Out app, I believe I was given a link and we actually had someone asking me to do a testimonial whilst I was physically at an event called the Events Forum. I gave my testimonial about how the event was going and talked about the atmosphere of the room, et cetera, and I could see other people were doing the same. And by the end of the day, my beautiful face, along with many other people, was collated into a kind of a recap video for the event. Also, each individual one was sent out to the different people who’d shared their testimonials. And people like myself were like, yeah, this looks amazing.
Lee:
So I ended up sharing it on social media as well. So that was my first experience of what you guys were all about and obviously picked our interest as to what are the benefits of a video in general. So let’s have a look at that. What would you say are the key benefits specifically for conference and exhibition organisers of using video, and in what way could we use video beyond, just, say, the testimonial?
Dan:
Sure. The thing about video is it’s kind of three dimensional in a way. You’ve got pictures and sound and you can tell a story a lot quicker than you can with text. In terms of people can kind of if it’s a testimonial, they can see people’s reaction, they can see the event. You get a lot more kind of sensory input on a video, so it actually means it’s a lot quicker to convey information. And events in particular are fantastic for video because they’re so visual. There’s a big thing now around FOMO, which is really one of the things Shout Outs about, is that you want to get videos out quickly to show people what they’re missing and to have them almost in the present tense where you’re hearing from people kind of as things happen. And there’s also a big thing around hybrid events and video and social media platforms can turn an event into a hybrid event very easily because you’re kind of putting out content on platforms where people tend to spend their time twitter or X, as it’s now called, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok even now. So you can kind of create that sort of hybrid feeling with video by showing what’s going on.
Dan:
And even we do a lot of awards where there’s little interviews or winner speeches that go up on Twitter walls, I guess they’re called X walls, now, don’t oh, crumbs.
Lee:
Yeah, this is going to be confusing, isn’t it, for the next few months.
Dan:
Yeah, exactly. But so that kind of adds a buzz to the actual event itself, that you can kind of see who’s in the audience, but you’re seeing these kind of big screens of these interviews that are auto playing. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question completely, but it’s just a very visual, very immediate events are very visual and very immediate and video works really well.
Lee:
Yeah, well, I mean, I’ve always considered video, really as a post event medium, and that’s probably to my own detriment. So I run an event every year. I have a videographer come, he’ll set up an area to get testimonials. They’ll all be filmed in Raw, so he’s then going to go away and edit them all and compile them all, cut them all and produce a whole load of really high quality testimonial videos. So that takes days and we don’t get them until several days after of which we then plop on the website and don’t really do much else with because we’re kind of hoping that next year a few people will come along and watch a couple of those and be convinced. What we have not done to date until I saw what was happening with the events forum was considered video as a medium of showing people what’s going on right now. Hey, this is happening right now, the whole FOMO thing, you’ll want to be here next year because look what’s going on. But equally, the thing you said here about what’s going on right now at the event, whilst you’re at the event, I mean, some of the events we attend are huge, and it’s really good to know what’s going on.
Lee:
What are people up to over the other side of the hall? What are people having conversations about over in the seminar area, et cetera? So that’s kind of opened my minds of the potential there for video, just beyond what I’ve always considered it as a way of recording what happened in order to show people it next year, as it were.
Dan:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the way I look at I’m a big F one fan and this kind of really sort of crystallised it for me. And I was lucky. I haven’t been for a while, but I was lucky enough to go to a few races, basically, and I’m a big fan of it on TV and I thought, I’m going to go to the race. And I went to them and to be honest, I didn’t know what the hell was happening. It was really loud. There’s things going past and you don’t have that kind of information telling you what’s going on. And in some ways, like videos for events where it’s kind of more of a hybrid, where the videos are happening as it’s happening, it can give you something else. Of course, you still want to be at the event but you can be kind of walked through with short form content and you can hear rather than hearing a 45 minutes talk from a speaker, you could get like a 45 2nd summary of what’s going on. You could hear what’s coming up next. So I think all that is really interesting, that you can, if you think of it like sport video can give you an extra dimension to an event to enhance your kind of time at the event, or even to be instead of to use that to go back to that Formula One analogy, people sit with headphones on, listening to the coverage so they know who’s winning even though the cars are right in front of it’s.
Dan:
Really interesting. That you can still a bit like an event app. You can still use video to really help walk people through it and get more value from sponsors and exhibitors. The other thing I should say about Shout Out I don’t want to keep plugging Shout Out, but the other thing it does, which is really clever, is when you make a video, say you do a quick kind of video with an exhibitor or a speaker, if they put in their email address, they get the video instantly as well. So just in a few seconds it pops up on their inbox and they can share it. It’s a great way of leveraging other people’s social channels as well where your exhibitors, your speakers can be sharing stuff as well.
Lee:
I think as well. What I’m seeing is a bit of a democratisation through software such as yours and through the very devices that we all have in our pockets. So I am now for the people listening, I’m waving my iPhone around which cost me an absolute bleeding fortune two years ago and I’m not replacing it until it falls apart. But I think it’s got like a HD or a 4K camera in there. It’s utterly insane. And if we think about it, last year I spent money on getting professional video done. We had a professional camera, we had all the lighting and everything done and this was something that we then had to go through post processing and could then only use several weeks after the show. What I’m hearing here is most people have got a pretty decent camera with microphone in their pockets. They can hook into software such as Shoutout, et cetera and essentially high quality video can be out there pretty damn quickly to showcase what is going on or what went on. And I guess the repurposing potential is nuts as well. Could you maybe share some ideas around repurposing of all of that content that we can collect?
Dan:
Yeah, absolutely. Just before I do that though.
Lee:
Sure.
Dan:
Because the thing is Shout Out is using phones and there’s a big it’s actually even kind of better or worse than you think in a way. There’s been so many studies done about user generated content, about lo fi content and how that resonates with an audience. So, one first thing to say, there’s a lot to say about this one subject actually. But to make a video, to make a really good kind of professional video, and to make it really engaging is almost impossibly hard. I mean, I’ve made 100,000 pounds videos, huge videos, and they are really difficult to make. And what you can end up doing is sort of getting a video that’s sourceable right, just looks like everyone else’s video and it’s kind of just a sort of generic event video, whatever. And that’s fine. And they work and they’re great for lead generation, for maybe exhibitors or sponsors year moving forward. But really where shoutout sits is much and not just Shout Out, but things like it is around the kind of lo fi authentic content. So we’ve seen a huge increase in things like Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and TikTok. And what that really represents is this kind of lo fi shot on the phone, authentic content, and TikTok especially, you know, if you’ve got a kind of glossy video, it just doesn’t fit in in the TikTok landscape or the real landscape, actually.
Dan:
And there’s so many studies about how important it is to have effectively user generated content. So these are kind of lo fi either created by the users or you’re filming a user just using a phone, which still has that UTC feel. So, yeah, it is really important to have that content mix. So to answer your question about repurposing, hopefully that will hopefully make no, that’s really helpful.
Lee:
And just on that to add to that. I mean, we used to pay an awful lot of money for sky and we’d watch all of these expensive productions, but nowadays we just follow a whole load of YouTubers as a family and we end up watching their videos that were predominantly done on mobile phones as they go around Disney World. And we’re just absolutely hooked on them. Anyway. Repurposing.
Dan:
Yeah, no, exactly. I would recommend anyone listening to this just google the UGC stats. It’s astonishing. Now you see it in adverts, even big TV commercials, TVCs are trying to look like user generated content or they’re using it’s everywhere. And that’s really I don’t think events are embracing that as much as they huge because people are stuck on this idea of professional, actually, you know, UGC is massively powerful.
Lee:
Probably the biggest takeaway then, for me.
Dan:
Yeah, it really is. And on the repurposing front, I guess that’s really, it kind of is aligned to the same thing. Content is a mix. You’ve got to make content for the delivery mechanism that if you’re making kind of a three minute glossy video that’s not going to sit on TikTok, it’s not going to sit on reels, it’s not going to sit on YouTube shorts, but you could repurpose that, or you could even do behind the scenes stuff on the phone. I think companies are getting a bit scared of this idea of making things professional. One other thing, actually. You asked at the beginning about something people don’t know about me. I studied a lot of psychology to be to understand content, because it’s kind of the same thing. So I don’t like qualified hypnotherapist counsellor, NLP practitioner Gustor. All this stuff I studied embarrassingly, actually. And there’s a thing around Hypnosis where it’s called Anchoring. So if you see something like if you smell a perfume, it reminds you of the person that wears that perfume. It’s just in all of us and the same can be said about content. So when you see a kind of generic video or an advert, it will just remind you of every other advert and you kind of turn off because you know you’re being sold to.
Dan:
So where UGC comes in, if your content looks like entertainment, your first reaction will be, this is if that makes sense.
Lee:
It does make sense. If it looks like somebody’s made it, you’re going to engage with it more. Because if it looks like entertainment as well, a, it looks like entertainment, but it also looks like it’s been manufactured. And there’s some ulterior motive. If I’m looking at someone talking to a camera, even in selfie mode, which is my favourite way to go, then yeah, I am more likely to engage with that. Well, it would be great, if you don’t mind, to let us take a peek at folks. If you’re listening to the podcast, we’ll put in a timestamp, you can cheque out the YouTube video, but it would be wonderful to have a look around and then I’ll ask you a few more questions afterwards, if that’s good to go.
Dan:
Yeah, sure. So I’m going to give you a really quick overview of how Shoutout works. I’m not going to go into too much detail because it could get very long, but basically this is a Shout Out dashboard here and you’ll see top left is where you build your template. So this is very we call it a bit Canva esque, so it’s got an intro and outro and an overlay, if you like. This particular project doesn’t have an intro and outro, but you can basically add design elements that we call stickers. We’ve got a whole bunch of kind of stock stickers or you can upload your own here. It could be anything you want. You can add, subtitles, automatically name, captions and text and also other images. So all this is a bit like your template, if you like. So you can see here it says Headline, and here it says Name company. What we call those is merge tags. And what that means is those merge tags will be populated by whenever you record the video, either you send the link to someone or you record it yourself at an event. So that’s basically the idea of it and also the merge tags can be images as well.
Dan:
So you can for example, and this might resonate with event marketing people when you make those kind of those like meet the speaker, meet the exhibitor where it’s got headshot, maybe a stand number, a bit of text around them in an animated video, we can do those as well. So you can send links to all your exhibitors. It will ask them for their headshot, ask them for some information and it will create a little animated video brilliant.
Lee:
That speeds up creation as well then, which is good.
Dan:
So that is basically like how you build your template. That’s the first section. So if I press back from here, I’m back into the dashboard. So the next thing I can do is actually make a video. So what I’m going to do is copy this invite link here and add it into another tab. So obviously you can do this by sending a link to someone or scanning a QR code. So effectively, imagine I’m on a different device now. So this is my record link. So if I press start, so I can either record on the webcam now or on the phone, or I can upload a file. So I’m going to upload a file here, it’s just a file of me talking and I’m going to put in the headline I’ll put in, this is a video I’ll put in my name. So this will populate the name caption. If you remember on the template I’ll put in the company Shout Out breed to the T’s and C’s, which basically just means I’m allowing this video to be used. So I can trim this video if I want to, or it can be trimmed afterwards and press done.
Dan:
And that’s basically it. So all those things that I added there, what I just did was added a video that I could have just recorded straight from the phone, but I just happened to have it on here. I added in my name caption details, added in the custom text. Where I put this is a video, but all that could be anything you really want. So can you see here the videos popped up, you’ve sent out of people recording the video. The dashboard is where your social media manager is and they could be at the event or anywhere that you want. So all these videos pop up as they go. I can share it to social. So if I just click on the sharing icon here, I can choose Twitter. I guess we have to rename that. I can either press share, if I press this generate with AI button, it will write the social post, add in any hashtags, which is really cool. So I can do that, share it, I can download it if I want to, I can add it to a playlist or I can edit the video as well. So if I click on here when I start trimming it fantastic down.
Dan:
So I could do what was called a multi trim. So I can trim a little bit of it. This is quite a short video, this bit. Click on another bit, trim that bit and it will just cut out all the bits in between.
Lee:
So you can essentially do like jump cuts as it were because sometimes we’ll have somebody who’s umming and ring, they’re thinking they get a little bit interrupted, a bit sidetracked, especially if it’s live kind of self generated video there. So if you’re the social media person you want to just kind of speed up the pace of the video a little bit. You can just come and do your multi edits and then publish.
Dan:
Exactly.
Lee:
Fantastic.
Dan:
And this is designed for non editors to use. It’s very simple. And you can just keep we call it multiple trimming. So if there was loads of them, you’ll just get loads of trims there and when you press save it just renders out the video that’s all cut together and you can choose transitions. I can also burn in the subtitles if I want to and it will.
Lee:
Put those subtitles and that’s all done by AI as well.
Dan:
Recognition they’re editable. You can actually use the subtitles to edit as well. So if you see I’m clicking on these here it means I’m going to where the subtitles are. If I click on the words it will go to that section. So you can actually go through the wording and say, okay, I don’t want that bit, I don’t want that bit. And just very quickly kind of change that. And then when you press save, basically that will just render out a new video. Everything video you see in here is in the cloud. So basically if you can see it, it means anyone with a login can see it, which is really cool. I can show you. So there you go. That’s the new video with the subtitle.
Lee:
Brilliant, thanks.
Dan:
So this is the international franchise show. I can show you how these videos work. So there’s a bunch of testimonial videos we’ve done here and what you can also do is upload a whole bunch of clips as well. So these clips are just shot on a phone and they’re effectively b-roll of the event. If you like B-roll, then what you do is go to this b-roll tab. You can just add your broll in and just very quickly create like a little timeline of b-roll. Really simple. Change the order, add that, then you go to make compilation. And what happens is I’ll just remove these. I can just select a whole bunch of videos that I want to compile together. I can go in and trim them down if I want to. I can go in and edit them down, just change the order. I can press compile, then press use broll and then create. And what that will do, I won’t do. That now, because this is not my account, but that will create a compilation video automatically in a few minutes. And what that will look like is something like this. So I’ll just play a bit of this.
Lee:
I can see the subtitles there, et cetera, and then you’ve got talking, you’ve got the broll, et cetera. That’s really good. And this is pretty much exactly what happened as well, at the events forum that we went to the other month. And this sort of video went out afterwards, which was a combination of testimonials and of broll.
Dan:
Exactly. But the point is, you can make them really quickly, make them automatically. If you don’t like them, you just click in here and just click recompile, change something, press compile again and it will do it. Also, yeah, you can make multiple videos very quickly.
Lee:
So, mate, that was a phenomenal demo. It looks brilliant and I’m sure people will want to check that out. So if you’re watching, there is a link down in the description. This is not an affiliate, so just go ahead and cheque it out. We just want you to see awesome tools. Equally, if you’re listening on the podcast, there is also a link in the show notes a, for you to go and watch the demo that you missed because it was incredible, but also B, to go and check out Shout Out as well. So, Dan, as well as speed and cost, what are other advantages for people shooting content on mobile phones?
Dan:
Yes, great question. I think the thing is, what we found, and I found having made a lot of kind of traditional event videos, is people are so much less intimidated when someone points a phone at them than when they are with a bigger camera. Certainly I travelled a lot all around the world, making event videos for big company events, et cetera. And what I sometimes thought, especially around testimonials, is I was thinking some of the best testimonials are like before and after the camera is rolling, everyone’s kind of really relaxed and they’re saying, this is great. And then the camera rolls and people get really kind of static and they’re.
Lee:
Like, really good event, looking around, feeling self conscious.
Dan:
It’s a bit like a hostage situation.
Lee:
It’s basically like all the testimonials at my event last year, but carry on.
Dan:
Yeah, but it’s so different when you point a phone at someone and there’s more of a relaxed atmosphere. There’s a big trend at the moment with presenters. We can go out with a presenter and a phone, et cetera, but people are just so much more relaxed, they kind of don’t take it too seriously. They’re a lot more themselves, if you like, and they don’t feel like they have to be on the camera. So that’s a huge advantage. And I’d love to say I thought of that with Shout Out, and I thought that was going to be a massive benefit I didn’t really consider how important that was, actually, until we started using it. It wasn’t even in my mind how big that difference was going to be. Obviously knew there was going to be a difference, but I didn’t know quite how big it was going to be. But, yeah, really interesting, especially we still make traditional videos and we sometimes at events we do Shout Out stuff and the video itself and we can see it, literally. The difference is astonishing.
Lee:
Well, as tech, as AI, as social media, platforms like Twitter are evolving into something that we all don’t know. What kind of future trends do you think may be in the pipeline for event marketers and or for video marketing?
Dan:
So it’s probably a strange answer, but I always like to look at the thing after the thing. I’ve seen it in films, we’ve all seen it in films, even in music, where technology went crazy with Midi and music in the films, it was tonnes of CGI. We just saw this whole kind of raft of CGI and these really dense kind of dance music tracks and then kind of people start rebelling against it and we had the kind of 90s Brit pop, the return of the singer songwriters are much more in cinema, much less CGI based films, much more storytelling. So I’m really intrigued about innovations and what the reaction is against the innovation. And for me, I think AI is super interesting. I think all these kind of deep, fake face, whatever it’s called, all these kind of Avatars you can create are interesting. But I think actually what’s going to happen, and it’s not going to be that long, is people are going to really kind of come back to the basics of wanting to hear from people in a very pure form, if you like. Well, I’m a big TikTok fan, I go on TikTok, and it is people mostly telling their stories.
Dan:
There are AI Avatars creeping in, but you just don’t get that connection. So I think AI is going to be interesting, but I think what it might actually do is really change things in a different way that we’re going to expect, and people are going to want to hear from people and they’re going to want authenticity and they’re going to want kind of passion, if you like.
Lee:
People are going to want humanity, aren’t they? And whilst we as marketers might be tempted to think that AI is going to speed up our marketing process and in theory, take people out of it so that we can just put it on automatic pilot and just automatically attract hundreds of people to our event, et cetera, that’s not really the case. We’re going to want to use AI to help us bring humanity to people again. So using a tool, for example, like Shout Out, yes, we’re using AI to help us generate the captions, to help us generate social posts, et cetera, you’ve. Obviously got good machine learning out in the background there as well, to be able to put all those videos together. So we’re certainly using forms of automation. But what’s important with tools, just like Shoutout, is that you are keeping the humanity inside of it. And I think humanity, like you say, it’s going to become a premium, isn’t it? Humanity will be a premium. We loved in the was our Oasis guy. Were you Oasis or Blur?
Dan:
It was one or the other, actually.
Lee:
So you were firmly on the fence. Well done and survived. The was an Oasis guy. But yeah, it is very much that, isn’t it? We crave what’s lost when it gets overtaken by kind of the manufactured and AI will at some point feel manufactured and we will crave that. Human touch will crave the user generated content because we’ll know this isn’t something that’s been processed or manufactured. I can see other uses for AI. So, for example, user generated content is great, but if the sounds awful, you’re not going to be able to listen to it. But you can use AI to clean up the audio. So there are use cases where it will help improve the workflow. But as long as we’re not removing that humanity, that’s probably my second biggest takeaway from this entire interview. That’s fantastic.
Dan:
That’s great. Yeah. I mean, Adobe are doing some amazing things around AI and audio. And like with Shout Out, we don’t really talk about it, but we auto level it. We denoise stuff. We do a lot of kind of clever stuff behind the scenes. Not that I’m kind of flogging Shout Out, but what I’m kind of telling is great. No, but what I’m saying is things like sound, you notice it when it’s wrong, but you don’t necessarily notice it when it’s right. So there’s a lot of stuff that clever companies are doing behind the scenes just so you don’t notice it rather than you do. And I think that’s really interesting. I think AI is brilliant for that. All those algorithms and yeah, I mean, it’s also with writing, I think there’s always going to be I think I said at the beginning, it’s almost impossible to make to make a great film. People think it’s easy to make a great video. People think it’s easy. It’s not really difficult otherwise. And no one really knows how to do it either. Otherwise all films will be great, all TV shows will be great, or music will be great.
Dan:
That’s the kind of artistry in it. And it does take a little bit of magic dust. And I think what’s interesting is if AI means that people have to kind of up their game more to get stuff better, and the people with talent will have more time to be really talented. Like, the talented writers will just write stuff that’s even better. And that boring middle bit, I think that will probably be taken over by AI, but I think it will mean that we might have more of a taste for stuff that’s good, whether that’s writing video, whatever films.
Lee:
Well, folks, if you’re watching this video three or four years in the future, do let us know. Were we right or are you all communicating through Avatars on meta? I hope we’re not, that would be terrible. So, Dan, thanks so much for your time. What’s the best way for people to connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.
Dan:
So, best way to connect with me? Well, you can go to the website www.shoutout.social to find out more about that. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Dan Gable. Yeah, I’d love to answer any questions about anything, really. I just love talking about content.
Lee:
Fantastic. So, folks, you can cheque out all of that in the show notes, including Dan’s LinkedIn profile as well. Dan, mate, thanks so much for your time. Have a wonderful day and I’m looking forward to having you back, maybe in a few months time for us to say we were totally right and for you to show us the latest in innovation over at Shout Out. Thanks, mate.
Dan:
Have a great day, take care. Thank you.