For years, the world of customer advocacy, my world, operated on a fairly predictable rhythm. We identified a powerful customer success story, and then we faced a choice. We could either commit to a significant investment of time and resources to create a professionally filmed video-a beautiful, cinematic piece with high emotional impact-or we could distill that success into a well-written, but static, PDF case study. There was very little middle ground. The high-end videos were our flagship productions, reserved for only the most strategic and large-scale successes. They are, and will always be, incredibly powerful. But their very nature meant they were rare. It meant that countless other incredible stories of innovation and partnership were relegated to a format that, while valuable, struggles to capture attention in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
The Bottleneck of Tradition
The challenge was one of scale and speed. A single professional video shoot involves weeks, sometimes months, of planning, logistics, travel, filming, and post-production. The budget required us to be extremely selective. We had to ask ourselves difficult questions: Does this story have a broad enough appeal to justify the cost? Will it still be relevant in three months when the final video is ready? As a result, many deserving stories never got the spotlight they merited. They were impactful, transformative for the customer, and full of valuable lessons, but they didn’t fit the high-bar criteria for a full video production. We were sitting on a treasure trove of advocacy, but our tools limited how much of that treasure we could share with the world in a truly engaging way. We knew we needed something more flexible, something that could help us tell more stories, more quickly, to more people, without sacrificing quality and impact entirely.
We had to move beyond the mindset that every story demanded a Hollywood budget or was simply confined to a static PDF.
The digital world has changed how people consume information. Attention is the new currency, and it’s spent in seconds, not minutes. We saw a growing appetite for content that was quick to digest, visually compelling, and native to social platforms like LinkedIn. A multi-page PDF, no matter how well-designed, just doesn’t have the same gravitational pull as a dynamic, 60-second video in a social media feed. We needed to meet our audience where they were, with content tailored to their habits. This realization sparked a search for a new approach-a way to complement our high-end productions with something more agile and accessible. We began exploring how technology, specifically artificial intelligence, could help us bridge this gap.
A New Toolkit for Modern Advocacy
Our breakthrough came when we discovered AI-powered video creation platforms. The platform we chose, Lumen5, was initially met with a mix of curiosity and skepticism. The promise was almost too good to be true: turn a written customer story into an engaging, branded video in under an hour. We decided to run a few experiments. We took existing case studies-the very PDFs we felt were underperforming-and fed them into the platform. The AI analyzed the text, identified the key themes, and suggested relevant stock footage, imagery, and music. From there, our team could easily customize every element, adding our own branding, refining the text overlays, and ensuring the final narrative was perfectly aligned with our message.
The results were immediate and transformative. A process that could take weeks was now completed in a lunch break. More importantly, the barrier of cost was virtually eliminated. We were no longer forced to choose which stories to elevate. Every customer success could now be brought to life visually. This was a fundamental shift in our strategy. We could now highlight a much broader and more diverse range of customer successes, from large enterprise transformations to smaller, niche projects that were equally innovative.
AI gave us the freedom to democratize storytelling, ensuring that every impactful customer success had a voice, not just the ones with the largest budgets.
This new capability didn’t just change our output; it changed our mindset. It fostered a culture of experimentation and agility. If a video didn’t perform as well as we’d hoped, the investment was minimal. We could learn, adapt, and create a new version in a matter of hours, not months. It also unlocked incredible potential for localization. With a few clicks, we could swap out visuals to be more culturally relevant for a specific region, change the text, and even generate a new voice-over in a different language. This allowed our colleagues across the globe to take a core asset and tailor it for their local market, dramatically increasing its reach and relevance without having to start from scratch. These short videos proved to be incredibly effective on social media, grabbing attention and driving engagement in a way that text-based posts simply couldn’t. They became powerful internal tools, too, helping our own sales and marketing teams quickly grasp project highlights and share them with their own networks.
The Future is a Blended Strategy
It’s crucial to understand that this AI-driven approach doesn’t replace our in-depth, professionally produced videos. Those flagship stories remain essential for deep-dive narratives and building powerful emotional connections. Instead, AI provides a vital complementary layer. Think of it like this: the professional videos are our feature films-epic, immersive experiences. The AI-generated videos are our short-form series-accessible, frequent, and perfect for building continuous engagement. Together, they create a richer, more comprehensive advocacy strategy that caters to different audience preferences and consumption habits. We’ve enriched our overall program with more frequency, more creativity, and more agility than ever before.
This isn’t about replacing human creativity; it’s about amplifying it, allowing us to connect with our audience in more frequent, agile, and resonant ways.
And we believe this is only the beginning. We’re already experimenting with other AI platforms focused on audio, exploring the possibility of narrated case studies or podcast-style summaries that people can listen to during their commute. The ultimate vision is to combine these different AI tools to build a new category of advocacy content entirely. Imagine interactive experiences where a viewer can choose their own path through a customer story, or personalized content that adapts based on their industry or role. By merging the efficiency of AI with the empathy and insight of human storytellers, we can create truly multimodal experiences that bring customer success to life in ways we’re only just starting to imagine. It’s a future where technology empowers us to celebrate our customers’ voices more loudly, more creatively, and more effectively than ever before.
