Quick wins for marketers ready to tap into AI video - with Lemonlight's Hope Horner

Val Riley: This podcast is brought to you by Unbounce Go to Market Solutions. Unbounce is the leading landing page platform for building, testing and optimizing high converting pages. With a drag and drop editor built in, a B testing and AI powered traffic optimization. Informed by data from over 2 billion conversions, Unbounce M helps marketers and agencies go to market faster, maximize ROI and and outperform the competition without the need for developers or designers. Visit unbounce.com to learn more. That's unbounce.com now let's get to closing time. Thanks for tuning in to closing time, the show for Go To Market Leaders. I'm Val Riley, head of marketing for Unbounce and Insightly. Today I'm joined by Hope Horner. She is co founder and CEO of Lemon Light, a video production company that has shipped more than, yes, 30,000 videos for brands like Amazon, Walmart, Google, Rolex and Samsonite. Hope, welcome to the show.

Hope Horner: Thanks Fel. I'm so happy to be here.

Val Riley: I mean, that's an impressive client list. Lemonlight, uh, has been producing videos for 12 years. Can you tell us when did AI enter the picture for you and what made you decide? Hey, this genius just isn't a tool to experiment with, but more of a part of your production model.

Hope Horner: Definitely. So I would say when ChatGPT came out in late 2022, we immediately knew there was going to be some really big opportunities to create more efficiencies for workflows and content creation using AI. So by the middle of 2023, the following year, we had actually restaffed our entire engineering team to be kind of AI first engineers and building the platform that we've created using AI solutions. But generative AI video didn't actually come out until around 2024. That was the like Will Smith spaghetti era, um, when SORA launched that first video and although that was obviously not the perfect example, it definitely immediately let us know that this was very real and it was coming. And so we made a big bet on Genai Video last year and I would say that's really when it became kind of real for us. Like we're actually generating revenue from it. We're creating real content for clients that are going to market, that are generating real results for them. And so it's been kind of an evolution like most things, but from the Gen AI video side, I would say really last year was when it became viable.

Val Riley: So I have to admire your foresight because in 2022 a lot of companies weren't thinking that way. So Kudos to you and your co founder. Um, can you walk us through what an AI video project actually looks like? End to end, like brief to final cut? What is that workflow like and how does it differ now that AI is involved?

Hope Horner: Yeah, that's a great question. So it's not that different actually than kind of traditional production workflows. It's just where the AI is kind of able to jump in and assist and create more efficiency. So just like always, you're starting with a brief and a strategy to determine what the goal is, who the audience is, KPIs that you want to hit. Um, next is ideation and script. For us, this is still very much human led, but AI assisted. So using AI to pressure test concepts to come up with different variants, pieces like that. I would say the visual planning, which is like style frames and storyboards, is really where AI starts to make a big splash. So for us we built a platform called Hero that basically does all of the gen storyboarding automatically, which has been a huge resource for our clients to get a really clear understanding very efficiently with exactly what their video is going to look like. In the end. The asset generation is obviously AI, whether you're using nano banana or Runway or any of the myriad of options that come out seemingly weekly now, you know, that's where the assets are being created. And then finally the actual assembly and post production are still for us, human led. Um, so actually taking those clips and putting them into a timeline to make a full video.

Val Riley: I, uh, like how you accentuated the part where um, storyboarding. Because sometimes as a person who has purchased video before, you know, you have this vision based on the storyboard and then um, you know, there's such a big difference between the storyboard and, you know, the day of the shoot. So it sounds like you can really bridge that part quite a bit better using AI.

Hope Horner: Definitely. I mean for both live action production and for Genai videos, I feel like the storyboard functionality has reached new highs, um, because they're so easy to iterate on now. So for Genai video, what you see in the storyboard is ultimately exactly what you get in the actual video. But even for live action productions, it's so much easier to create the storyboard image itself, um, to inform the team that's going to set and so you can really fine tune that with the client before you, before the production day begins.

Val Riley: Right? Yeah, just, I mean to me as a consumer of, of, of a purchaser of video production, it just feels like I'm not going to have Any as many surprises as I've had in the past, that's pretty amazing.

Hope Horner: Yeah, that's our hope.

Val Riley: Um, so marketers always want to know, of course, because we all are slaves to our budget. What should I expect to pay? So does AI video production have a big impact on pricing versus traditional production? And, um, are there real savings there?

Hope Horner: So this is the number one question we get asked, and everyone that asks has wildly different understandings of what is real today and what is possible. And can I click a button, get a video versus can I actually have a video that's going to work for my brand? So, um, I'm glad you asked. There's a lot of noise in the market that we have to kind of work through frequently. For us at Lemonlight, a 30 second video costs somewhere between 2,000 and say $20,000. And that's an extremely big range. And $20,000 may seem like a lot of money, but if you're comparing that to say, a $1 million production budget for a Super bowl ad, that seems like an extraordinary deal. Um, but the price itself really comes down to complexity. Right. So if you are shooting a single product with two characters and house setting that can be pretty generic, um, that's going to be closer to the $2,000 range. If you are shooting highly complex scenes with large crowds and real world environments that have to look exactly right or say full fantasy worlds, that's where the budget can definitely get bigger. Um, but for us, the budget itself includes not only the asset generation and all the AI costs, but also the human oversight through that entire experience so that you understand exactly what you're getting and that ultimately there's someone behind to make sure it ultimately looks exactly like your brand.

Val Riley: Yeah, I think to some folks that range might seem wide, but to a marketer that doesn't really seem that wide. Because I do know as I'm going into a project, you know, the number of people, the number of scenes, the number of cuts, the complexity, like, so I think that's actually a pretty fair range. I'm going to validate you there.

Hope Horner: Thank you. And I also want to say it's not that you can't go online and click a button and get a video for $50 like that is real. But most brands are looking for something that are, that's a little bit more high fidelity. And so that's the range that we work within, um, because we are creating higher quality content that's usually being used to generate more customers for the customer.

Val Riley: Exactly. Um, so you touched on this A little bit. But just to drive the point home, where does AI genuinely shine in video production and areas where it still might fall flat. So kind of thinking like, what are some quick wins that marketers could go after right now where AI really does help in that production process?

Hope Horner: Yeah, I think some of the areas that it does really well in are like we talked about the previz and kind of pitch work. Right. If you're pitching um, a client, your own client, you can do a lot of the work using Genai video to sort of get the concept across, clear, any kind of stylized B roll or kind of moody pieces. What used to be stock footage is now Genai video and a lot of more accurate to whatever it is you're looking for because you can create it instead of having to select what's already been filmed. Um, anything that's like historical, fantastical or very difficult to shoot Genai is going to be great for that. For all the obvious reasons. Um, we produced a commercial with a skydiver recently. Obviously we did that with Gen AI because filming a skydiver would be very, um, expensive and hard, dangerous.

Val Riley: A little scary too, Right.

Hope Horner: So I'm sure insurance would not be okay with that. Where it falls flat though, I think is definitely the specific human performance element. Right. So nuanced acting, emotional driven dialogue. Anytime you need humans to really convey the message itself, AI struggles. But still, um, it's great for kind of like VO LED videos. And then the other area where we're still seeing some struggles is definitely really complex products. Think like a piece of medical device equipment or something like that that has to be really brand accurate. There are still challenges with getting it to be perfect. I do think that will get fixed sooner than later, but that's definitely a real challenge today. And then I would say for quick ones right now, you can use it to make tons of variants. Right? You can upload a long form video, click a button and get 10 different outputs that you can now use in organic, social or across a variety of different mediums. Using to AB test. That's a huge win. If you're creating a live action commercial or video, you can use AI to do all the kind of like um, establishing shots or a lot of the kind of generic B roll shots. That's going to be a quick, easy win, place to save and then also for, I would say like testing ideas in market. So if you're taking your concepts ahead of time to pressure test your market or your audience, you can use AI videos to kind of do that quickly.

Val Riley: And iteratively to double click on the variant creation a little. Is that something that a standard AI tool that I might have access to, like Claude or Chat GPT can do? Or are there specialized video tools that your team has access to that are specific to video production?

Hope Horner: So Claud and chatgpt do not do this, but there are very accessible tools in the market. I would say one that we like is called Get Munch. Um, you upload a long form video, it will output a variety of different short form pieces of content. So that's one. There are a lot of variations of that, um, product. So just quick Google search should help you find some.

Val Riley: Yeah, the click a button, get a great video, you know, may never really happen. But if you had a look in your crystal ball and say, you know, in the future where AI might be more effective, is there any spot that you see right now, maybe a year from now, where we might be getting more from AI than we're getting right now?

Hope Horner: I definitely believe we will be. The way that we think about it, both on a short and long term timeline, is where humans stay is in the judgment layer, in the taste. So the dozens of little creative decisions that it takes to get from the beginning of the product to the end of the product, giving the feedback, nuanced brand control, knowing when something is almost right versus actually right. So that piece is very important today and I believe will continue to be important forever. I think what gets better and better is, and what gets automated is more of the labor. So like we've talked about, storyboards, call sheets get automatically generated. That's not a person having to create those anymore. Um, instead of going on set to shoot, you do generate assets directly. Instead of an assistant editor taking time to prep all of the footage and lay it out, that can now be done by AI. So I think the different labor components will continue to get better and continue to save time. I think the judgment and taste is what will remain as extremely important, um, for humans to be part of.

Val Riley: So is the Will Smith eating spaghetti? Is that like something we should be checking in with annually just to see how, how much better it gets over time? Because I know the early cuts were pretty rough.

Hope Horner: They were pretty rough. Um, and I think OpenAI released a video, I believe, remaking the Will Smith eating spaghetti. And obviously it was night and day different and really shows you how far the industry has come even in such a short, you know, time, couple years.

Val Riley: Hope there might be some listeners out there who are on marketing teams or leading marketing teams that have not done anything in relation to AI Video. What would you say is a great first step for them?

Hope Horner: Yeah, I bet that's a lot of, lot of folks. Um, so I would say the first step is to try it, find a little bit of budget. Find either the right person on your team to pursue it or the right partner to help you and commit a small amount of budget, commit to doing it the right way and setting the expectations on the front side that this is not. Click a button, get a video. It's, um, augmenting certain parts of the video creation process and see what you come up with. You know, we've had great results with our clients who, you know, historically have shot, you know, dozens of live action commercials throughout the year who are now heavily, heavily relying on Genai Video. So it's really about finding the right path for your team, trying it once and then iterating on what worked and going from there.

Val Riley: All right, that's a really great first step. Well, um, hope, where can folks learn more about you or Lemon Light?

Hope Horner: Yep. So you can find us@lemon lemonlight.com L E M O N L I G

Val Riley: H T thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate your time.

Hope Horner: Thank you so much, Val. Great to be here.

Val Riley: And if you would like to get this episode or every episode of closing time delivered right to your inbox, just click the link in the show notes. We will see you next time.