Celtra Video Editor

Context

Company: Celtra
Timeframe: 2015–2016
Role: Director of Product → Sr. 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 were being skipped and scrolled past long before the product made its appearance.

Objective

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.

Output

I was responsible for the product’s research and design, directed the MVP development, and helped shape its roll-out, launch, and commercialization.

Hands-on contributions:

• Designed a video editor web app specialized for adaptation of TV ads, simple enough for amateurs to master.
• Designed an outstream video player UI and ad format specifications for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
• Conducted a qualitative analysis of the video ad typology and video editing creative experiments that proved the adaptation model.
• Developed the production methodology for adapting TV ads into silent vertical video ads that consistently delivered performance lift.

My research findings and competitors analysis directly informed the product strategy, which I continuously worked on in close partnership with the CPO. I also directed the quantitative analysis of thousands of video ads, and led the interdisciplinary team of product managers and designers as the project scaled.

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); a 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, so mobile video ads were confined to video content inventory.

Celtra’s engineering team achieved a breakthrough by recompiling the MPEG-2 video decoder to JavaScript, opening the door for 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’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.

Designing for amateurs

During research, we lived through the learning curve of Adobe Premiere and After Effects ourselves. Much of the editor’s design was informed by the inadequacies of professional tools and the simplicity found in emerging mobile apps for video creation. Three decisions made it usable by amateurs yet powerful enough to cover most adaptation use cases:

1. A guided production flow: import media, edit the sequence of shots and cards, then reframe the shots and design the cards.
2. Each mode of the app used the best UI for the task at hand, instead of every tool being fitted into a cramped panel as in pro software.
3. A deliberately simple interface with labeled buttons and a restrained set of tools.

We even started the process by designing for tablets to constrain ourselves to a mobile-first approach, fully knowing the product would most likely remain desktop-only.

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

Roll-out and launch

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