Personalized video

A personalized video is one that is clearly meant for the person receiving it rather than for a list. The personalisation can live in two places, and the difference matters commercially.

The first is the recording itself: the sender names the person, refers to something specific about their business, and could not have sent the same file to anybody else. This is the strongest form and the least scalable, because it costs a take per recipient.

The second is the page around the recording. The video is the same for everybody, but each recipient opens their own page carrying their name and company, arriving through a link that belongs only to them. Nothing inside the video changes; the arrival does. This scales to hundreds and is honest as long as the video does not pretend to be individually recorded.

A third form is sold heavily and delivered rarely: video generated per recipient from a script and a synthetic presenter. It scales furthest and tends to be recognised for what it is, which undermines the reason for sending video in the first place. Buyers evaluating this category should be clear about which of the three a vendor actually does.

Personalisation stops working the moment the recipient can tell it was automated. A video that greets someone by name in a voice that clearly recorded a hundred other names is worse than one that greets nobody, because it makes the sender look like a process. The safe test is whether you would be comfortable if the recipient understood exactly how the video was made, which is a standard the third form rarely passes.