If you’re working for an advertising agency or you’re in charge of a brand, editing and exporting a video ad that works across all social and web platforms can be a lengthy and time consuming task. French startup Aive speeds up the process quite drastically as it can automatically generate all formats and all durations from one source video.
When you create a new video to showcase your brand, you usually start with a 16:9 video with a duration of a couple of minutes. It can be a good first step to create shorter versions for TV spots for instance.
But the advertising industry has changed — 30-second TV spots are no longer as relevant as they used to be. Many brands now want to advertise across different platforms, which means that you need to provide a video that integrates natively with these platforms.
For instance, on Snapchat, brands need a vertical 9:16 video if they want to insert ads in between user stories. If a company wants to create a video for the Instagram newsfeed, a square 1:1 video will work better.
Each platform has different requirements when it comes to format, duration and even content emphasis. On YouTube, you can create very short videos that last just a few seconds or longer videos that can be skipped after a few seconds. In that case, you need to display your brand’s logo as quickly as possible to make sure that people don’t skip too quickly or get the message as quickly as possible.
When Aive users upload a video, they get an overall creative score and a breakdown of all the strengths and weaknesses in the video. For instance, the platform tells you if the video will work well on mobile, if the brand is showcased appropriately and more.
After that, users can create automated tasks to repackage that video. You can select multiple lengths and formats at once for your output videos. Once the service has finished processing your videos, you can see the result and manually adjust some details that don’t work as well as expected.
For instance, if you think the algorithm deleted an important scene, you can replace a scene in the output video with a deleted one. Once this is done, you can download the output videos to your computer and use it across several platforms.
The startup recently raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) seed round from dozens of business angels, including Pauline Duval, Renaud Visage, Kevin Polizzi, Jean-Paul Brunier, Aurélie Jean, Julien Chaumond, Jérémie Rosseli, etc.
With this funding round, the company plans to double the size of its team from 15 to 30 people. If you add previous funding and public funding from Région Occitanie, Bpifrance and La French Tech, Aive has scored $7.5 million (€7 million) since its inception.
Because it is a software-as-a-service product, Aive also works well as a team. Users can leave comments and annotate videos for other users. There is also a built-in user rights management system, which can be useful for freelancers, clients and agencies.
While the most expensive ad agencies can already generate variations of the same video for their clients, Aive makes this process more accessible to different teams and companies. It means that you don’t have to restrict yourself to a couple of ad campaigns per year as it’s easier to refresh your ads more frequently.
It’s still early days for the startup as Aive has been testing its product in private beta with a handful of companies, such as Club Med, L’Oréal, Monoprix, Nissan and Swile. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the product evolves in the coming years.
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