Eighteen years ago, when Chris Wickson and I were freshly minted graduates, if you’d asked us if we expected to spend most of our careers working together from that point forward, I think we’d have been surprised. However, it’s now 2024, and the two of us are back working together on a new product.
Our vision this time around is to energize businesses that see video as an important part of the future of their communication, and to forge trust by using their own team to engage prospects and customers with relevant short-form, interactive content.
A huge and rapidly growing generation of the workforce places an incredible reliance on their mobile devices, and we know that the growth of short-form video as an influence on these same people—acting as consumers—has been explosive. The trend shows no signs of abating. Yet, to many businesses, the world of short-form video remains exotic and difficult to enter, even though it can mostly be achieved with products we all already own. While their young workforce might be happy creating and putting content out under their own personal brands, taking ownership of this as a business is not as easy, and beginning the creation process can seem daunting.
We are also sailing into turbulent waters. AI is already changing the relationship between search results and advertising, and as such, all businesses will have to adapt to survive. Almost certainly, what has worked before in SEO and paid ads will not work in the near future; some businesses will fail to make the transition, while others may place the wrong bets. Additionally, the rise of regulated privacy in third-party social spaces and websites means we understand less and less about who prospective customers are and what they are doing in these spaces — spaces where we cannot prevent the incoming change.
Yet there are places that businesses do own and where trust remains absolute, and complete brand control is still possible: first-party properties like our websites. Often stagnant, cookie-cutter experiences that haven’t significantly changed in a decade, these spaces hold untapped potential. We want to enable businesses that see significant value in short-form video content, who may have a team that believes in it, but who have so far struggled to execute it effectively, to take ownership and use it to energize the spaces where they have full control. Often text-first content management systems don’t make it easy to bring video to the fore, but we will address this.
ReelFlow will place our customers' most valuable asset—real people—at the heart of the process. In 2024, we have the advantage of some of the most interesting advances in technology to create and deliver engaging, personalized video content while retaining authenticity and trust. And while text and other media will always remain important, in a world of ever-shorter attention spans, maintaining that place of absolute trust and authenticity carries greater importance than ever.
If you’re interested in being a partner as we develop our software, please reach out to us, we’d love to speak: product.feedback@reelflow.com
