In The Know with Axonify

Lights, Camera, Learning With Video! w/ Enrique Olives & Craig Kingsbury (Vyond)

• Axonify • Season 3 • Episode 5

Share episode

Creating compelling training content is tough. You're often forced to choose between building it on your own, which is time-consuming and expensive, or borrowing it from an off-the-shelf library, and we all know how disengaging generic training modules can be. 

What if you could leverage a proven method for telling powerful, meaningful stories to boost your training effectiveness? 

We’re exploring the magic of video with the experts at Vyond. Enrique Olives and Craig Kingsbury join JD to discuss how video content makes workplace training and communication more relevant, efficient and effective. They’ll also share tips for building high-impact videos and showcase Vyond’s latest AI capabilities. Plus, we’ll explain how Axonify’s partnership with Vyond is helping companies overcome the limits of traditional off-the-shelf content.

 
For more about why Axonify is the proven employee enablement solution that equips frontlines with the essential tools to learn, connect and get things done, visit axonify.com.


JD Dillon (00:19):
Hello friends, how are you today? It's great to see you and welcome to the 46th episode of In the Know, your 25-minute dive into the modern employee experience and what we can do to make it better. I'm JD from Axonify, and today's episode is all about video. Now, how many hours of video do you think the average person watches each week? Drop your guests in the LinkedIn chat right now. I'll give you a hint: it's a lot. That's because video is our dominant form of media. Video streaming accounts for 82.5% of all global internet traffic and 15% of that is just Netflix by itself. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, anyone can make a video and that's why 3.7 million of them are uploaded to YouTube every day. Now, that's 271,330 hours of new content for you to check out after work is done today.
(01:11):
Exciting, I know. But just because anyone can produce a video doesn't mean anyone can produce a good video or tell an impactful story. I've been creating videos for almost 20 years, since my earliest days at Disney. Look at that. Look at that guy. My undergraduate degree is also in radio-television production. And these skills come in handy when you need to build engaging, relevant, actionable training content. But even with an educational background, producing great videos is still hard. I mean, anyone can use a camera and some basic editing tools, but can you craft a story that catches people's attention, communicates an important message and motivates them to action? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today because Craig Kingsbury and Enrique Olives from Vyond are here and they're going to explain how video can be used to make workplace training and communication more relevant, more efficient and more effective.
(02:04):
They're also going to show us some of their newest AI-powered tools. Plus, we're going to share more details on how Vyond is partnering with Axonify and how we're helping companies overcome the limits of traditional off-the-shelf training content. But before we welcome our friends from Vyond, I think it's important that we consider just how far we've come when it comes to the use of video in workplace learning. Now, the average person watching more than 17 hours of video each week is the answer to the question earlier. The bar for quality isn't being set at work. That's something important to consider. It's being set on TikTok and YouTube, where people are applying innovative tools to produce more and more creative content. But it wasn't always this way. YouTube only started in 2005, and back then, it was a video dating website. And creating, distributing and watching videos
(02:55):
used to be a lot more difficult, more time-consuming and more expensive. I mean, how many of you remember or did this yourself, rolling out a TV cart with a VHS or a DVD player to play videos for classrooms full of employees? That's where I started. These challenges resulted in some, let's say, questionable uses of the medium, especially back in the eighties and the nineties. So before we explore the now and next of video production and AI-powered technology, let's take a quick look back at where this conversation began and check out a few classic training video clips from the YouTube archives. Now, our first clip is from a 1980s employee orientation video for a popular family restaurant and entertainment venue. And see if you can spot my favorite moment in this clip.
Chuck E. Cheese video (03:45):
Chuck E. Cheese is not just a pizza place, it's an experience. We hope your role here will be not only as an employee but as a key player in that experience. You are responsible for making sure that each guest who joins us, kids and adults alike, has the best possible time. And the way to do that is not only with a happy, positive attitude, which is very important, but by knowing every aspect of your job. Oh, did I tell you? You also get paid for having all this fun.
JD Dillon (04:21):
It's a good thing they clarified we're getting paid for this job because I just assumed we were there for the unlimited free skee ball, which would not have been a bad deal at all. Our next clip is one of many training videos that seized on a nineties trend because clearly, the youth loved their music videos and definitely wanted to learn that way. Check it out,
Wendy's video (04:52):
Coffee’s holding time is thirty minutes, that's so long. It can stay there before it starts to taste too strong.
JD Dillon (05:15):
Now that song and its super handy tips for coffee preparation are going to be stuck in your head for the rest of the day. You're welcome. Up next, we have a bit of a meta example. This is a video that's being used to train people on how to rent videos.
Blockbuster video voice 1 (05:42):
Yo, Marie. Hey, let's wake up. 
Blockbuster video voice 2 (05:45):
Who are you? 
Blockbuster video voice 1 (05:48):
My name's Buster. Buster Sales.
JD Dillon (05:50):
Okay, now we've all done that thing where we've come up with the fun names for characters that reflect our brands, but typically those characters are a little bit more tactful.
Blockbuster video voice 1 (06:03):
Clearly, you need some help, especially with finding opportunities.
Blockbuster video voice 2 (06:07):
I know an opportunity when I see it.
Blockbuster video voice 1 (06:09):
Sure. Like the time Mrs. Harris' son Brian asked you out, and you turned them down to go to Jane Allworth’s stupid slumber party.
Blockbuster video voice 2 (06:18):
Shh. Not so loud, God. His mother is right over there. And anyway, how was I supposed to know he was that hunk friend of Tyler's with the beautiful eyes.
Blockbuster video voice 1 (06:27):
And the tickets to the Bon Jovi concert. 
Blockbuster video voice 2 (06:30):
I don't want to discuss that
JD Dillon (06:32):
Now, I have no idea what any of that has to do with renting videos. But now I definitely want to be friends with Brian because I am also a big Bon Jovi fan. Our last clip has a special place in my heart because it's actually the first video I ever watched during training at my first job. Take a look.
Movie theater video voice 1 (06:50):
You know, working in the theater box office can be quite an experience.
Movie theater video voice 2 (06:55):
Howdy ma'am.
Movie theater video voice 1 (06:56):
Each day you come in contact with a seemingly endless stream of people whom you've never met before and whom you know nothing about. Two tickets, please. In fact, all you know about each customer is what you observe during your short interaction with them. There's no time for anything else. And for those customers on the other side of this glass, there's no difference. They have one moment, hopefully a brief one, in which they make their ticket transaction with you.
JD Dillon (07:26):
And I can attest to the fact that everyone that I met at that movie theater was, in fact, a Parisian cowboy biker gang member. So I was very well prepared to serve them thanks to that training video. Now, that's all the time we have for today, but if you want to pick up a few lessons from our past experiences with video-based training, there are plenty more examples available on YouTube. But now let's find out how we can take our video production to the next level with our special ITK guests, Craig Kingsbury and Enrique Olives. Enrique Olives is Head of Product Marketing at Vyond, where he oversees a team responsible for product positioning and messaging, marketing strategy, sales enablement, competitive insights and analyst relations. Prior to Vyond, Enrique led product marketing for Salesforce's Media Cloud and has held a variety of senior leadership positions in broadcasting, business development and finance. And Craig Kingsbury is a customer success manager at Vyond. He assists enterprise customers using Vyond through live online training, building and maintaining customer relationships and overall support. Craig is focused on delivering high-quality support to Vyond customers and ensuring users get the most out of the product. Craig and Enrique, you're in the know, how y'all doing?
Enrique Olives (08:31):
Hey JD, how's everyone doing?
JD Dillon (08:34):
Great to have you here. So Enrique, let's start with you. And for the few viewers out there who may not be familiar with your company and its tools, could you explain what Vyond does in 30 seconds?
Enrique Olives (08:44):
Sure. And thanks for having us again, JD. So Vyond is your AI-powered video maker. So what we basically do is we put the power of video creation in everyone's hands, allowing users from every industry or job role to create videos that are business-relevant. And we are trusted by 65% of the Fortune 500. We have over 20,000 customers and millions of users worldwide.
JD Dillon (09:11):
Awesome. And we're going to see exactly what that looks like in just a few minutes. Now I want to jump to Craig. Craig, you're working directly with these organizations that Enrique spoke to that are using Vyond to build videos. And maybe some of these folks are newer to leveraging video, new to leveraging Vyond. So what are the biggest benefits you see organizations getting from this format?
Craig Kingsbury (09:29):
Yeah, JD, you actually already touched on a couple of those things. First of all, it's going to be cheaper and quicker to create and deliver. Someone could create content with Vyond in less than a day and then deliver that to their audience the next day. So right there, there's a huge benefit. But it's also just going to make your content more engaging and interesting for your audience, both internally if you're trying to send out communications to your team or externally, maybe even a sales team is looking to separate themselves from just the standard emails they'll use beyond for things like that to kind of create a little bit of differentiation with their communications.
JD Dillon (10:09):
And there's no question, as you said that, especially when you compare to some of the clips we watched earlier, that producing and streaming video is easier than ever, but that doesn't mean that every organization has an effective video-based strategy. So I'm curious from y'all, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that you find that people have about video and its effectiveness for learning and communication at work?
Enrique Olives (10:32):
I think generally, JD, what we've seen talking to our largest customers, and Craig here talks to them daily. The biggest misconception we've seen is that people think that video is expensive. They think it's complicated to do and they think it takes way too much time. So while most businesses understand the power of video and want to use video in their communications, they basically get stuck in operationalizing and scaling video. We all know working with third parties that, for the most part, traditional methods or legacy methods of creating video content take way too long. So a huge challenge that they face is actually this notion of a black box. So basically, the way we describe that is once a client has signed off on a project agency goes into production, there's this period where companies seemingly don't have an idea or have no clue what's happening, and then they come back with a video, client's not happy with it. They have to go reshoot, find actors or actresses and make sure they're wearing the same clothing. It's really complicated. So what we've seen with Vyond is that, because you're creating it on our platform, if you want to make a change, you can go into that specific scene and make that change very quickly. So it's a lot more cost-efficient and saves a lot of time.
JD Dillon (11:58):
I can speak to my own experience as a video developer. I mean even simple things took a lot of time and a lot of effort. I remember when I was building e-learning content, just trying to find voiceover performers because I didn't have the budget to go pay people. So I would just kind of scrounge the contact center for people who were just good at voicing, could effectively read the script and maybe kind of resembled the character that I was trying to portray. So I think we're in an entirely different world right now when it comes to some of the things you think are simple but actually take a lot of effort when you're trying to create great content. And that it comes down to the fact that video isn't just one thing. There's a variety of different types of tools and formats that you can use to create video-based content. In our conversations, before you came on the show, we were talking about this idea of mixed media. So I'm curious to get your perspective on what mixed media is in video and how this approach benefits creators.
Craig Kingsbury (12:54):
So with mixed media, it can take a number of different forms. From the most obvious form, if you need to show somebody how to basically navigate through some sort of software, maybe it's something internally they need to use, you can take screenshots, you can take video recordings of that, place that directly into a Vyond video and then you can lay animation on top of that. You can use narration. Whatever it is that you want to do with that. From another perspective, if you want to make videos and you don't want to have maybe characters within them and you want to make them more realistic using real images and videos, you can actually use our integration with Shutterstock. I think we have 3 million images and video clips within there. So there's a ton of resources that you can use. If you're looking to make different sorts of content within even just a tool like Vyond, you can do that with mixed media.
JD Dillon (13:46):
And some of my favorite videos on YouTube actually now are examples of mixed media. I don't know what this is, and I don't know if everyone else has this experience, but as I get older, I get increasingly fascinated with history videos from the early 1900s. I don't know why I wasn't big into history in school, but there are a lot of great videos out there that are kind of using that same tactic of, well, they can't go out and shoot recreations of these very dynamic historical events, but they can take stock footage, they can take still images that are familiar and then layer on other components to tell the story effectively and do it in a way that's much more economical and much faster to deliver in a kind of modern streaming format. So I think we see mixed media a lot, even if we don't necessarily think, oh, that's a mixed media video, we just kind of think, oh, that's a video.
(14:32):
And at the top of the show I mentioned that I've been doing the video thing and producing videos part of my job for almost 20 years at this point. And when I started, because we didn't have these types of tools like Vyond, we didn't have streaming platforms, you couldn't really upload a video easily into a learning management system. What I was doing, was putting videos into my instructor-led training sessions. So I would embed videos in a PowerPoint presentation and then use them to tell stories and reinforce key points. One of my favorite all-time uses of video, if you don't mind, was when I was building the training for an opening team of the new Kim Possible Attraction. And what I did was I got a peer of mine who was kind of an entertainer type of a gentleman, and I made him wear a bowler hat and a fake mustache and a cape.
(15:16):
And we went out to Epcot before the park opened and shot a series of vignettes in the different countries where his villain character was just causing havoc for the guests. And, of course, he could only be defeated by the participants in the classroom when they applied their guest service skills in a series of practice activities that we were going to run in the instructor-led training. And at the time, that was a really kind of novel creative use of video based on the tools that we had available to us then. So I'm curious, from your experience, fast forward several years into the future, what kinds of unique video examples are you seeing within organizations you work with? So are there any particularly creative or impactful ways that the organizations that you work with have been using video to tell stories?
Enrique Olives (15:56):
I'm not sure, JD, if we could top any of your Disney and Epcot examples here, but let me share quite a few. So we've talked a lot about learning and development, but across human resources, across HR, we've seen where companies are transforming their communications with video. Craig touched on this earlier, where we've seen sales teams using videos for sales training, sales enablement, personalizing pitches for SDRs and outreach. And we've seen where video is embedded for marketing in conversion landing pages. We have a ton of case studies on our site, but let me pick out two of them that I feel are really interesting. So one is GoHealth. So GoHealth is an insurance marketplace and what they do, JD, is they've actually created 50 microlearning videos using Vyond. So if you call and you're a member, while you're on hold, if the customer service rep doesn't know the answer to the question, they're actually watching a Vyond video to find the answer while you're on hold.
(17:10):
So really interesting use case. And there are over 2000 customer service agents that have access to the Vyond videos that they create. American Express also uses Vyond on a similar note, more for training their customer service reps and partner reps. The third example I'll share is Whole Foods Market. So they've been a long-time customer of Vyond, and they basically partner with us to train their employees who are on the floor. For them, they've seen that the capability to create videos and train their teams is really game-changing. So what used to take them, I think Craig may have alluded to this earlier, what used to take them days, 3, 4, 5 days now takes them less than a day to be able to create engaging videos for their employees.
JD Dillon (18:03):
Awesome. And the story's getting even more interesting now with the introduction of generative AI in various types of AI capabilities. So personally, I'm leveraging, I just shot some video content yesterday where I'm using a bunch of different types of AI tools, including Vyond, to create content in new and more efficient ways. But instead of just talking about how AI is changing video production, Craig, would you mind showing us a few examples of how AI is helping creators tell their stories with Vyond?
Craig Kingsbury (18:28):
Yeah, for sure. So it's really simple. I mean, if you’ve played with any other AI tools like JD, like you mentioned, it's going to be really similar experience. And what we can do is we can just go into Vyond and we can just pull up the AI tool, which we're calling Vyond Go. And from here we can basically just plug in a topic. So if I want to do something really simple like that, I can put in something like, “What are new trends in training for sales teams” or something like that. So I'm just going to copy that over here so I can put in the prompt. You can even have it suggest prompts for you, too, if you just kind of want to play around with it. Then from there, you can just choose different layouts. So the way that we have it kind of set up, you can have either a conversation between two characters. You can have what we call talking head, where it's basically just one character delivering the content to the audience, or a narration where if you wanted to remove the characters altogether or do kind of mixed media things too, like we were talking about before, these are all options that you can choose from.
(19:33):
So from there, you can just choose maybe whichever one it is that looks best for you. And then we have additional settings where you can even change the tone of the video. So anything from formal up to playful, if we want to keep it informative, we can do that as well. The format, anything like anecdotes, announcements, tips, overviews, we can do something like that. For this one, I'll just click on overview. And then we can also choose how we want the text to be displayed. Because I chose one that wasn't like characters having a conversation back and forth, we had the option to either display just the key phrases or the dialogue that would just play underneath everything. So, for the most part, I usually just kind of choose whichever one I think I like best in most cases, I like the key phrases. We can even choose languages too.
(20:16):
So if you want to produce something in a different language, you can actually do that directly from this point. But from here, we actually just click Create Video, and this process really takes maybe 15 seconds. It's pretty amazing. I play with a lot of AI tools and it always kind of blows me away with how quickly it's able to actually generate the content. Basically, what we'll see is on the right-hand side, this is what we'll call our quick edit section, and this will be everything from the dialogue to the text that is displayed on screen. So we can actually edit all that directly from this point without even needing to make any sort of other changes. So it really is easy to hone in the content that you want to do. So if there are any little details you want to change or refine, you can do that directly from this point, and it will actually update that content on the left-hand side. I'll hit play on this and then we can see a little bit of the video it created.
Vyond video demo (21:16):
Have you heard about the latest trends in sales team training? No. What's new? Well, studies show that trained sales teams perform better than untrained ones. That makes sense. What kind of training are we talking about? There are a few new trends like microlearning and gamification. Interesting. How does microlearning work? It's short, focused training that can be done on-the-go through a mobile app. And what about gamification? It uses game-like elements, like points and badges, to make training more engaging. That sounds…
Craig Kingsbury (21:48):
Right. So I'll just stop it there. So if there were things that we wanted to change within here, we could easily do that. So if there are little bits of text or things like that that we want to change, we can click right over here which will automatically update the text that we see within the video. We could even go in here and click on the dialogue from this point, and we can change those as well. So what we were hearing, that's actually, those are well said voices that we've recently integrated. They're really high-quality text-to-speech voices. It's pretty amazing how much real people it actually sounds. But if you want to click in here and want to make a quick change to that, you can easily just go over to the Quick Edit side on the right-hand side, and then you can find any of the different voices that we have available and then click on them and apply that directly to the video that you just created.
(22:36):
So you don't have to worry about finding a new voice actor or anything like that, any sort of changes you want to make, you can just do with a couple of clicks. Now the other thing that we can do if we want to get even more customized with this, what we can do is we can hop out of the Quick Edit just by clicking up on the top section of this and going into the full edit within Vyond Studio. I'll just click in here and I'll share this tab. So once we're in the full studio, we can start branding it. So if we wanted to do things like we wanted to change the color scheme, if we wanted to change these different elements within here to make it maybe a little bit more on brand, we can easily do that. And I can actually just do that in a couple of clicks.
(23:15):
I could select the entire video, basically, and I'll just scroll over here. I'll click into here. And then, if I wanted to find some of these different assets that we have and make them maybe a little bit more office-focused, I can click into them. I can go over to our props and I can even just type in office, like that, and I can pull in different things that I think would be a good fit for that. So if I wanted to replace it, maybe I want to put in a skyscraper here. Maybe I want to just replace this moon over here with something that just looks a little bit more office. We have this file cabinet or something like that. Then when we go back over here and we can look at the video, we'll actually find those different elements within here. So we can also resize those two depending on what we want to do, but it makes it really, really easy to make changes to the video that you're working within.
(24:05):
Now the last thing I'll show you here that's pretty cool. Let's say I also needed to make this video in Spanish or something like that. Well, we can just do that with a couple of clicks. So what we can do is we can go up here to the top right and click on translate this video. It automatically detects whatever language it is that we're within. And I can just switch this over. So right now, we're in English. I can just scroll down, I can find Spanish down here, and I can just find that there. We can even choose different dialects. We're in the US, so I'm going to go ahead and click on Mexico, which is right here, and we click translate. This process really doesn't take very long. Again, I think this takes, depending on how long the video is, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, but this will actually translate all the texts that we have on screen as well as all the dialogue. So when we look at this, once this is fully completed, we'll actually see the different texts that we have on here that's already been translated, and then the dialogue's been translated as well.
JD Dillon (25:08):
It's an incredibly powerful capability, especially the fact that Gen AI and the types of tools like Vyond Go can get you so far down the path from basically never having to start from scratch when it comes to generating the new idea, generating the foundation of that concept and that story that you want to tell. And I think that idea of how we're using these new tools to solve familiar problems in new ways is particularly powerful. And I think one of those common challenges that we're working together to solve is off-the-shelf content. Because off-the-shelf content is an essential part of L&D strategy. And if you take something like ladder safety, as an example, there's a ton of ladder safety content out there. So why should L&D start from scratch and spend their limited time and resources recreating that particular wheel instead of pulling content from an existing marketplace like Axonify’s Content Marketplace?
(25:56):
But even then, I've always found off the shelf content to be kind of meh when it comes down to it. It might cover the key stuff, but it doesn't quite fit my organization, my brand, doesn't look like my company or carry my tone, or maybe there are some specifics to my process related to this topic. And then L&D ends up just having to create more stuff to add that necessary context. So that's why we were really excited about how Axonify is partnering with Vyond to offer a product we call Content Studio. So what we've done is we've taken almost 600 of our Content Marketplace videos, all of which were created with Vyond and made them available to Axonify customers to customize. That's right. You get all of the editing files as part of Content Studio, and what that allows you to do is take advantage of everything that Craig just showed to make our content marketplace your own, including custom branding, translations, captions and a whole lot more.
(26:50):
So I find it's a really unique solution to a very familiar challenge when it comes to making off-the-shelf content yours to suit your individual organization's needs. And it's all thanks to the power of the Vyond authoring solution that Craig just highlighted. So if you want to learn more about Axonify Content Studio powered by Vyond, you can head over to axonify.com/content for more details. So now, as we run out of time, we've showcased a lot of cool tech. We've talked about examples of organizations that are using video to tell their stories effectively. But before I let you all go, I'd love to get one or two big tips for anyone out there who wants to use video to tell a great story.
Enrique Olives (27:28):
JD, I would say keep it short, keep it fun and keep it engaging.
JD Dillon (27:35):
It's a great place to go there. Craig, what do you have? 
Craig Kingsbury (27:38):
I was just going to say I totally agree with that. I mean, it makes it so easy with Vyond to create that short engaging content. So a hundred percent.
JD Dillon (27:46):
Yeah. The only other thing I would add is that the tools themselves aren't going to get you there. The technology's amazing. It's going to accelerate your ability to tell the story, but it's really honing in on what's that story and what's the audience need. You spoke to that example earlier with supporting contact center agents with that microlearning-style content. So what's the right content and the right story you need to tell and then take advantage of these types of technologies in order to provide the video that's going to help people do their best work. So Craig and Enrique, thank you so much for joining us here on ITK. How can people connect with you and follow the awesome work you're doing at Vyond?
Enrique Olives (28:19):
Sure, please connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email at enrique.olives@vyond.com.
Vyond video demo (28:26):
Yeah and connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email as well at craig.kingsbury@vyond.com
JD Dillon (28:32):
Awesome. Thank you again so much to Craig Kingsbury and Enrique Olives for sharing their insights on creating great videos. If you had a good time today, be sure to subscribe to ITK. Head over to axonify.com/ITK to sign up for show announcements and reminders. You can also binge-watch the entire ITK collection on the Axonify YouTube channel or listen to In The Know on your favorite podcast app. And be sure to join us in two weeks for our smallest episode ever. Well, it's not the episode that's going to be small, it's the topic because we're talking microlearning. Robyn Defelice, co-author of Microlearning Short and Sweet, will be here to discuss how organizations are applying microlearning to make learning a meaningful part of everyone's job. I'm also going to challenge Robin to our first-ever microlearning melee. We're going to be applying microlearning principles to solve familiar workplace challenges live right here on the show. And if you play along with us on LinkedIn, you might have a chance to get a copy of Robin's book. So be sure to tune in on Wednesday, April 3rd at 11:30 AM Eastern for a not-so-micro episode with Robyn Defelice. Until then, I've been JD. Now you're In The Know. And always remember to ask yourself the important questions like, “What do you call a werewolf with YouTube channel?”
(29:43):
Lycan-subscribe. I'll see you next time. In The Know is produced by Richia McCutcheon and visually designed by Mark Anderson. Additional production support by Andrea Miller, Maliyah Bernard, Tuong La and Meaghan Kay. The show is written and hosted by JD Dillon. ITK is an Axonify production. For more information on how Axonify helps frontline workers learn, connect and get things done, visit axonify.com.


People on this episode

Head Shot

JD Dillon

Host