Speakers: James Kotecki, Director of Marketing & Communications, Infinia ML
What do you see as the role of video in marketing going forward?
James Kotecki: I'm gonna give two answers to this question. One is think about any science fiction, movie or TV show. Are there more videos in the world of the future or fewer videos in the world of the future than the world that we live in right now? On average, I would say there's way more videos in the futures that we collectively have imagined for ourselves. So if you are wondering if video is the future, you can kind of look to our collective psyche on that as we reflect it back through our own storytelling. And the second answer is personal, because I actually started a video blog on YouTube in 2007 talking about politics. In fact, I actually interviewed several presidential candidates at the time, in my college dorm room at Georgetown University. I was one of the first people kind of talking about how presidential candidates were using YouTube in their campaigns. So personally, I'm extremely biased. I love video. It is really at the heart of who I am. I absolutely do not think that every single marketing campaign or marketing initiative needs to have video attached to it. In fact, in the work that I'm currently doing at Infinia ML. There's probably a little bit less just because we're trying to still figure out our marketing and our messaging to know exactly what kind of videos to make. So I don't want to say that it's right for everybody and every moment, but I will say that video, as I see it, kind of brings us back to an earlier era of communication. If you think about the earliest forms of communication between human beings, it's a person standing in front of me making noises or making motions, and they're communicating something to me, right? And then, through things like pictures and writing and paintings and all those things as beautiful and as wonderful as all those are, those actually get away from that kind of very basic, very instinctive garbled communication in a 1 to 1 kind of way and video actually brings it right back to, 'There is a person standing in front of me, albeit on a screen who is making motions and saying things with their with their mouth, and those sounds were coming out, and I'm hearing that I'm being communicated with. It's very, very personal and hopefully the way that if you're watching this video, you feel like I'm personally connecting with you right now. So I don't think anything can really match or surpass that for video. Until they get to some kind of Holodeck, of course. And I certainly hope Vocal Video will work on that, but until then, video is where it's at.
