Live Video Makes its Move Into the Enterprise

Live video continues to make its way through the enterprise as brands and retailers have seen what is possible, first with experimenting on social networks in 2016, then in 2017 we saw brands making a move towards live video events including Walmart’s - 4-hour Cyber Monday event, adidas’ Live Yoga session on National Yoga day and  Healthsparq’s “What the Fix” town hall on healthcare. These were just some of the events held using the live video platform from Brandlive. Without a doubt, 2018 is the year that live video comes of age, with brands and retailers using video for “in the moment” campaigns, large-scale consumer commerce events, live training and product launches, sales kick-off meetings and internal company meetings with world-wide participation.Findings from a recent Brandlive and IBM Cloud Video survey found that companies adopting live video to train salespeople and associates are among the top-rated use cases for live video ROI. In the past 12 months, 56 percent of respondents used live video to train retail associates, 50 percent used it to train sales representatives, and 47 percent used it to train customer service representatives.To take it a step further, a number of brands/turned publishers have built their own studios and are pushing live and pre-recorded video to their owned sites and apps, giving consumers direct access to product experts and providing an open and direct form of communication. That investment has been met with a dramatic increase and demand for utilizing live video across the enterprise across marketing, sales, biz dev and training and development. One particular example of a brand that has taken its use of live video beyond public events was Cabela’s. Formerly the Learning and Development Manager for Cabela’s, Dustin Edwards, led the organization responsible for transforming product training for Cabela's. Edwards helped the major outdoor retailer gain national attention for using live video to train over 10,000 sales floor outfitters by executing more than 300 events a year, across 77 U.S. locations. “As a long-time user of the Brandlive platform, I can say without hesitation that live video has become essential to retailers for communicating across sales associates, various locations, and partners, as well as with consumer audiences,” said Edwards. In response to the continued push for live video across the enterprise, Brandlive is rolling out a video learning platform on the same day as the world’s largest event dedicated to training and development: the ADT International Conference & Exposition. The Brandlive Video Learning Platform allows brands and retailers to create live video and on-demand video courses with built-in interaction, utilizing the right kind of quizzes and polls to ensure content is resonating with their intended audiences. With more than 200,000 lessons already completed during Brandlive’s beta period, retailers are already seeing results. Brandon Braun, Director of Training for Premium Retail Services (Premium), a fast-growing retail strategy, merchandising, brand advocacy and support firm was an early beta user and said, “We recently adopted Brandlive’s Video Learning Platform and have found that its agility and ease of use enables us to deliver training that is more effective and resource efficient. The value that Brandlive brings to our organization is continuing to grow, and we are already looking for new areas to expand into using the service.”The Video Learning Platform is integrated into the Brandlive platform for easy lesson and course creation, providing trainers with access to metrics that track individual progress. Now training leaders can utilize an interactive video platform that will improve their employees’ training experiences, while increasing engagement, product knowledge and even retention. “If you can turn a camera on, you can create a course,” said Fritz Brumder, Brandlive CEO. “Now more than ever, employees are wanting to move away from classroom-style educating to a more agile and personalized learning experience. We designed this learning platform with today’s customer in mind.”