1. How do you see organizations leveraging video formats (e.g., behind-the-scenes) to build trust with Gen Z and Millennial audiences?  

Video has evolved beyond a digital marketing tool to become a powerful force for human connection, especially among Gen Z and Millennial audiences. Social video is less about persuasion, as one might see with traditional advertising, and is more about entertaining and informing users: as iStock’s global research platform, VisualGPS, found, about half of Millennials (45%) and Gen Z (50%) say they use video‑first platforms for entertainment. Additionally, the VisualGPS research shows that 31% of people globally seek out videos on social media for inspiration and to learn something new. With these insights in mind, brands and SMBs should focus on video content that adds value to people’s lives to build interest in their brand by teaching viewers something new or sharing a personal story.

A staggering 98% of people say they value authenticity in the visuals they consume, which is one reason that behind-the-scenes content is becoming such a popular (and powerful) format. At a time when audiences are deeply skeptical of content they encounter online, video content that humanizes a business and comes from a place of authenticity is more likely to foster trust. To do so, businesses are adopting popular social video formats that mirror the content users are already looking for.

For example, a local bakery might work with one of their employees to create a “day in my life” video – a common lifestyle video format – to showcase the bakery from a behind-the-scenes perspective while giving audiences a personality to connect with. Meanwhile, a beauty brand might debut a new line of products with a “get ready with me” (GRWM) video–a format that is as much a vehicle for powerful personal storytelling as it is for showing the look and feel of a product. Our research shows that video-led personal journeys inspire empathy and engagement, and these first-person, narrative-focused formats are deeply compelling while fairly simple to produce 

All this to say, many small businesses don’t have the time or resources to produce 100% of their own content. They may also want to include visuals they can’t capture locally, or represent more diverse identities in their videos. To solve this, small businesses are utilizing stock footage to augment their video content. The right pre-shot imagery and footage can evoke a certain mood, heighten the impact of their message, and allow more audience groups to see themselves reflected in a brand’s content.

Overall, a combination of stock footage, smartphone video, and user-generated content will help brands and businesses to strike that coveted balance between authenticity and polish. 

2. Which platforms are brands prioritizing in their video distribution strategy (e.g. Instagram, YouTube), and how do they adapt content formats to meet each platform's expectations? 

Brands are going where their audiences are going. Which social platforms they target will vary depending on which audiences that brands want to engage, where their brand social accounts already have a strong presence, and where they hope to grow. From there, brands are creating video content in line with the expectations of users on a certain platform. For example, TikTok content might play to a trending format or make use of a viral audio file to increase discoverability, while YouTube videos could be tailored for more intentional, appointment-style viewing.

A major trend of note is long-form content, which is gaining widespread popularity across platforms. It’s a shift that defies the reality of our shrinking attention spans and speaks to consumers’ appetite for valuable, authentic content. This is not to say that every brand should be churning out hours of video entertainment. Rather, the growth of long-form video gives brands more time and freedom to tell their stories.

3. How effectively does video content reflect a brand’s personality—whether fun, premium, or purpose-driven?

If every piece of content is an opportunity to create a personal connection with a potential customer, then it’s best to portray your brand honestly and authentically. In engaging today’s consumers, personality and credibility go hand-in-hand. Video content that effectively showcases a brand’s personality is content that focuses on who the brand is, not just what it sells or how it operates.

Brands should also account for industry-specific nuances when creating content that expresses their personality. For example, health and wellness brands might consider showing how their products and services improve the lives of everyday people, rather than leveraging paid influencers, as 81% of people prefer to see real individuals actively improving their well‑being over aspirational imagery. Even sleeker, more “premium” brands can humanize their content by showing the passion and care that goes into the work. It’s all about leaning into personality in a way that compels audiences, but also feels truthful.

4. Are SMBs using video to demonstrate products (e.g., unboxings, tutorials, testimonials) in ways that reduce buyer friction and increase conversions?

According to VisualGPS, 72% of consumers prefer video for product demonstrations, making them a crucial way for SMBs to help audiences understand their product and make informed purchasing decisions. Video allows for a 360-degree view that static online shopping doesn’t offer, as well as the injection of customer testimony or expert commentary from the seller. The more questions a business can answer about how their products look, feel, and function, the more likely they are to convert.

Fortunately for small businesses, these kinds of videos are not excessively expensive to produce, and audiences will value the authentic, realistic look at the product. These videos also offer another chance for SMBs to show off their personality, building further trust and amplifying the chance of conversion. 

5. How do you quantify the impact of video storytelling on long-term customer loyalty and brand trust?

Our ongoing VisualGPS research looks at consumer sentiment over time, and our latest video insights reveal that approachable content told through diverse, creative formats are what resonate most with consumers, building loyalty and trust.

As for quantifying the impact of an individual campaign, each brand has its own specific metrics that matter most, but video content has been expressly linked to higher conversion rates, social engagement rates and improved SEO. SMBs and brands can also use UTMs to see if videos are driving web traffic and monitor for an uptick in product reviews, location check-ins, and social mentions.

And it’s not just quantity that matters: when posting visuals on social media, comments and direct messages from audiences can be valuable sources of qualitative feedback to help SMBs determine whether their video campaigns are resonating.

6. How are you preparing your teams to scale video storytelling as part of a broader digital engagement strategy in a “video-first” environment?

Video content has been a core part of our offering at iStock, and we work with our content creators to produce compelling clips and footage that can be used for just about any project, whether it's for social media, paid ads, websites or digital banners. Creating and scaling original content, especially high-quality video content, can be cost-prohibitive for SMBs; stock footage enables businesses to create varied, personalized and more creative videos to engage a wider variety of audiences. With the variety of dynamic video options available to today’s businesses, it’s easy for them to find something that feels like a true fit for their brand and the story they’re trying to tell.

Scrolling and watching videos online is how so many people fill the downtime in their days, so brands and businesses want to enter these spaces without being invasive and overly advertorial. Video content that models what users are already seeking, while coming from a place of honesty and authenticity, is the ideal way in.

The secret to scaling storytelling is to mobilize your teams as storytellers. It’s important to look at the metrics and understand which content attracts which audiences, but the human element is what truly unlocks scalability without requiring a massive budget. Audiences have a keen sensibility for what’s real and what isn’t, and the best way to keep them engaged is through storytelling that feels honest.

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When it comes to combating subscriber churn, nurturing long-term relationships is the key. Today, we sat down with Gilles Domartini, CEO and Founder of Cleeng, a subscriber retention management (SRM®) company to discuss strategies that can strengthen the subscriber engagement lifecycle and activate personalized, real-time approaches that can convert passive users into loyal subscribers.

1. You’ve described Cleeng as a “Subscriber Retention Management” company. How does that differ from traditional subscription platforms?

A Subscriber Retention Management (SRM®) system takes a more strategic approach to keeping subscribers engaged, reducing churn, and maximizing lifetime value. Our SRM® suite helps traditional subscription services optimize retention by leveraging data-driven insights, ensuring payment reliability, and providing robust customer support.

For example, our customers include traditional subscription platforms such as Univision, Volleyball World and Newsmax. By leveraging Cleeng, Newsmax gained over 150,000 paying subscribers within the first month and retained over 85% of those subscribers as part of the launch of Newsmax+, their OTT service that provides access to Newsmax for those without traditional cable subscriptions.

2. Can you share an example of how a small change in personalization led to a big impact on engagement or retention?

One example that comes to mind is our most recent work with Skyship Entertainment and how a simple change of streamlining their billing process to meet the demand for multi-channel offerings, led to impactful subscriber growth.

Skyship Entertainment is the company behind Super Simple Songs, one of the world’s most trusted educational brands for preschoolers, with 47 million Youtube subscribers. With an audience spanning millions of families worldwide, they wanted to scale their reach even further and offer a more premium, ad-free experience that children could use independently, with content parents could trust.

Specifically, parents wanted the ease and freedom to subscribe once and access the service across multiple devices, whether on iOS, Android, or Amazon tablets. By leveraging our multichannel billing solution, they were able to create a unified multi-channel experience, without making the experience complex for subscribers.

Over the past year alone, the platform’s subscriber base has grown by more than 140%, driven organically, by improving the onboarding flow, having seamless cross-device access, and increasing awareness through YouTube.

3. What’s one underrated metric companies should track more closely when it comes to churn prevention?

One underrated metric that companies should pay closer attention to is Time-to-Convert: the duration between when a user signs up and when they actually start a paid subscription.

While it happens at the very beginning of the customer journey, it can be a strong indicator of future churn risk. A long time-to-convert often signals friction in the onboarding process, a lack of perceived value early on, or hesitancy to commit. These are factors that can lead to weaker engagement and, ultimately, higher churn. Tracking this metric can help teams identify and address conversion bottlenecks before they turn into retention problems.

Yet, there are many more KPIs to succeed, like winback rate, cancellation rate, upgrade/downgrade, LTV. That’s the benefit of having a platform like Cleeng that helps you easily monitor those.

4. What are some UX mistakes you see platforms make that unintentionally drive users to churn?

One of the most common UX mistakes I see is not being transparent enough about trial periods and billing. When users aren’t sure when they’ll be charged or how to cancel, it creates mistrust and often leads to churn right after a free trial ends. A 65%+ conversion from free to paid is typically a good benchmark.

Another issue is making it difficult for subscribers to access their content across devices. If logging in or switching between devices isn’t seamless, users get frustrated and may give up on the service altogether. Nowadays, the web only accounts for 40% of connections (may vary substantially), and the vast majority of people connect on multiple devices.

But perhaps the most overlooked mistake is failing to support users when a payment fails. It represents between 30% to 50% of all churn. Many people churn involuntarily because their payment didn’t go through, not because they wanted to leave. If the platform doesn’t make it easy to resolve payment issues, you lose customers who actually intended to stay. Focusing on transparency, smooth access, and proactive payment support can make a real difference in keeping subscribers engaged.

5. How do you identify the “right moment” to deliver a specific message to a subscriber?

With D2C subscription models, brands are able to collect a significant amount of data from its subscribers, however the challenge that many of them face is efficiently extracting insights from the data and leveraging them to make impactful decisions. These data-driven decisions are crucial to identify that “right moment” to deliver messages to subscribers in order to stay competitive, maximize customer lifetime value.

Advanced AI tools can be beneficial to help streamline this process. With our ChurnIQ AI-ssistant, we help brands get precise answers from their data without the need for deep analytic expertise, which can be both costly and time consuming. Brands can leverage AI-ssistant by asking simple prompts, which will then quickly generate data visualizations, and uncover hidden trends and patterns from their subscriber dataset. These insights can then be used to send those specific messages, uplevel retention strategies, adapt to evolving customer needs and enhance user experiences.

6. If you could give one piece of advice to D2C leaders trying to improve retention, what would it be?

If I could offer one piece of advice to D2C leaders focused on improving retention, it would be to treat retention as a core discipline, not just a byproduct of great content. Retention success requires more than reactive strategies; it depends on having the right infrastructure to support seamless subscriber experiences across billing, offers, payments, customer care, and data analytics.

Too often, platforms rely on fragmented tools or internal builds that are hard to scale or adapt to changing needs. Instead, it's worth investing in solutions that are purpose-built for subscriber businesses. These should offer automation, actionable insights, and the flexibility to support multiple models such as subscriptions, pay-per-view, or seasonal passes.

What sets the most resilient platforms apart is their ability to respond quickly to churn signals, optimize the right levers, and experiment without being held back by complex systems or limited resources. In a competitive and fast-moving landscape, adaptability and operational precision are essential for long-term retention and growth.

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1. What does your approach to real-time personalization different from other CDPs or journey orchestration platforms?

Most CDPs and journey orchestration platforms limit how much data can be used for real-time personalization, often restricting brands to a narrow set of behavior signals and limited customer history. Hightouch removes those limits. Our approach is built around full data access and flexibility, enabling marketers to combine real-time behavioral signals with the complete depth of customer history from the data warehouse. With our new take on same-session personalization, we made it possible, for the first time, to react to in-session activity using the entire customer profile. Whether you're delivering an experience in under a second or orchestrating it over minutes, our real-time product suite is designed to meet the full range of real-time needs with no trade-offs between speed and data richness.

2. Same-Session Personalization is a bold claim. What was the core challenge in marketing that this feature is solving?

The core challenge is relevance in the moment. Without understanding current customer behavior, personalization efforts can create a disconnect between user intent and brand response. Same-session personalization solves this by allowing marketers to react to in-session signals, like product views, cart behavior, or site search, in less than a second. That means offers, messaging, and experiences can adapt as the customer is browsing, not after they've bounced. Our approach to same-session personalization goes one step further, and makes it possible to combine behavior signals with complete customer history in under a second. Brands can interact with their customers as a person, not just a set of digital behaviors.

3. Many CDPs force marketers to choose between speed or historical depth. How do you remove that trade-off?

Hightouch is uniquely positioned as a Composable CDP, which means we use the data warehouse as the source of truth for rich customer profiles, while also integrating real-time event streams. This approach means marketers don’t have to sacrifice depth for speed. You get the historical context of warehouse data and the in-the-moment context of behavioral events. It’s not about choosing between the past or the present. With Hightouch, you get both.

4. How do you handle identity resolution in same-session scenarios where the user might not yet be logged in?

We can use anonymous identifiers to stitch session activity to a profile. Whenever an anonymous user authenticates or provides identifying information, we can retroactively connect their session data to their historical profile in the warehouse, and be ready to address that user’s anonymous identifiers in the future as well. This enables persistent, privacy-safe personalization that respects user consent, while still delivering highly relevant experiences in the moment.

5. What’s your take on how AI and decisioning engines are collapsing the gap between insight and action?

AI is transforming marketing from reactive to predictive. With tools like Hightouch’s AI Decisioning, we’re enabling marketers to operationalize insights the moment they emerge. Rather than waiting for analysts to surface trends or build segments, AI models can evaluate user behavior and context in real-time. AI Decisioning constantly experiments and continuously improves delivery based on the results of each experiment. The result is personalization that’s not just fast, but smart—driven by data, governed by logic, and scaled through automation. Even with this rapid iteration, it’s also really important to surface key insights back to marketers, so they can improve their overall strategies and create more effective content and campaigns.

6. How do you envision yourself evolving to support marketers as zero-party and consent-driven data become the new norm?

Hightouch is built on privacy-first principles. As the industry shifts toward zero-party and consented data, our composable architecture gives brands full control over what data is collected, how it’s used, and where it’s activated. We’re also investing in features that help marketers surface and act on self-reported preferences in real time, whether that’s through consent banners, preference centers, or in-product feedback. The purpose of personalization is to create connections with people, and that starts with trust. With Hightouch, security, privacy, and trust are not an afterthought; they are core components of our architecture and company culture.

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1. Why did you choose to focus on dealership-specific workflows and inventory-driven SEO as the core of the platform?

After decades of experience across retail automotive, technology, and media, my co-founder and I kept encountering the same gap: SEO strategies often looked good on paper, but they rarely aligned with how dealers actually operate or how customers make decisions. Agencies had structured playbooks, but most were keyword-driven, templatized for scale, and disconnected from the inventory, data, and workflows that drive real revenue on the showroom floor.

As we began building Hrizn, Google’s Helpful Content updates only made the gap more obvious. Dealers and agencies needed a platform that could consistently produce meaningful, compliant, and context-rich content, at scale… while also adapting to fast-changing search dynamics and customer expectations. But no existing tools truly supported the complexity of automotive retail. So we built one from the ground up.

Hrizn was designed to meet customers at their moment of intent with content that’s not just visible, but useful. That means content that’s directly tied to the workflows dealers and BDCs rely on every day, grounded in VIN-level inventory data, and automatically linked to helpful experiences and conversion points like live offers, service incentives, and finance approval flows.

Inventory-driven SEO isn’t just a tactic, it’s foundational. When dealerships rapidly expand authoritative, unique content across their site and product inventory, the results are exponential: better visibility, higher Quality Scores in paid media, lower cost per click, and significantly improved on-site conversion rates. It’s not about chasing rankings… it’s about creating an owned content infrastructure that fuels both organic growth and paid performance.

Ultimately, we believe SEO in automotive can’t live in the abstract. Dealers don’t sell keywords… They sell cars, service, and trust. Hrizn bridges that gap by aligning content strategy with operational reality… connecting the agency, the dealer, and the customer in a way that finally makes content a profit center, not just a checkbox.

2. How do you handle localization and brand consistency across multi-rooftop groups or agencies managing multiple clients?

Historically, localization and brand consistency have been at odds. Dealers and agencies have often had to choose between one or the other; producing generic content at scale or manually customizing every page to stay on-brand. With Hrizn, that tradeoff no longer exists. We’ve engineered a platform where localization and consistency aren’t just compatible… they're a competitive advantage.

Hrizn is built to scale intelligently across multi-rooftop dealer groups and agency portfolios. Users can define brand voice, visual language, content guardrails, and editorial standards globally… then dynamically localize content by region, demographic profile, inventory composition, dealer tone, and zip code level search intent. It’s the difference between publishing for a market and actually connecting with it.

The platform supports deep learning across internal and external linking strategies, artifact training to help our models understand nuanced concepts and positioning, and hyperlocal optimization that ensures content performs in the backyard… not just in national rankings. That means we’re not driving traffic for traffic’s sake… we’re driving the right traffic with high commercial intent.

Whether it’s preserving a consistent luxury brand tone across 10 rooftops or surfacing city-specific service content based on regional demand signals, Hrizn ensures every piece of content reflects both the brand’s identity and the customer’s local context. For agencies managing dozens,or even hundreds of clients, Hrizn’s workspace segmentation features make it easy to orchestrate complex strategies while maintaining efficiency and creative governance. For OEMs wanting high-level compliance controls and brand language application, Hrizn supports the need while allowing the agency and dealer the creative flexibility to innovate and differentiate.

On a more operational level, Hrizn empowers OEMs, agencies and in-house teams to manage both macro content strategy (campaigns, seasonality, product launches) and micro content outputs (inventory markup, geo-targeted SEO, fixed ops education) in one unified workflow. The result is faster speed to market, stronger collaboration between teams, and a content infrastructure that gets smarter and more defensible over time.

In short, we help OEMs, agencies and dealer groups break free from copy-paste content at scale and move into a new era of intelligent automation. One where every word is aligned with the brand, tuned for local intent, and engineered to drive real results.

3. How does the platform support integration with existing CMS, CRM, or CDP platforms?

Hrizn was designed from day one with interoperability at its core. We know that dealers and agencies already rely on a complex tech stack across CMS platforms, CRMs, CDPs, and DMS tools. We designed our system to complement, not complicate, those workflows.

Our content delivery layer is CMS-agnostic, supporting direct publishing and export into the most widely used automotive web platforms. Whether it’s an in-house team managing a proprietary CMS or a large agency overseeing hundreds of rooftops across multiple platforms, Hrizn integrates seamlessly into existing publishing pipelines producing not just content, but the associated html code and meta data for easy transfer to CMS and automated formatting with the website CSS for beautiful native content integration.

For CRM and CDP connections, Hrizn is actively exploring enrichment through selective data integrations, enabling content to be informed by real customer behavior, lifecycle stages, and campaign strategies. This means, for example, that fixed ops content could be dynamically adjusted based on repair order trends, seasonal demand, or customer segment data… ensuring that what’s published isn’t just SEO-optimized, but conversion-optimized as well.

Looking ahead, the upcoming release of the Hrizn API will unlock even deeper integrations with CMS, CRM, CDP, and DMS platforms. These enterprise-grade connections will be available to strategic and enterprise partners, enabling powerful use cases like:

●        Automated content personalization based on lead source or buyer profile

●        Dynamic campaign landing pages that align with real-time incentive pushes

●        Inventory-level content customization driven by aging, pricing, or merchandising data from the DMS

Our philosophy is simple: Hrizn doesn’t seek to replace the systems dealers already depend on, it’s designed to amplify their value. By turning structured and unstructured data into on-brand, compliant, high-performance content, we help OEMs, dealers, and agencies create meaningful customer experiences that are rooted in operational reality and measurable results.

4. How is performance tracked post-publishing? Are there built-in analytics or integrations with tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush?

Performance tracking is central to Hrizn’s mission - because in this space, content without outcomes is just noise. We’ve designed our platform to provide both high-level visibility and deep technical insight, depending on the needs of the user.

Hrizn encourages every user to monitor content performance through industry-standard tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and leading rank-tracking platforms. These validations allow dealers and agencies to measure SEO impact in the context of their broader digital strategy and make data-informed decisions across channels.

For users and teams who need more granular insight, Hrizn Analytics provides a robust technical suite purpose-built for content-driven SEO. This includes advanced Google Search Console and Google Analytics connectors, keyword rank tracking, page-level performance data, and competitive visibility tools… giving SEO and content leaders everything they need to track what’s working, surface opportunities, and iterate with confidence.

In addition to SEO and traffic data, Hrizn also provides comprehensive content creation reporting capturing productivity, publishing velocity, content type distribution, and collaboration metrics. This is especially valuable for dealer groups and agencies who need to merchandise their body of work, justify value to internal stakeholders, or assess performance across clients and rooftops.

Our philosophy is simple: content at scale is only valuable if it performs at scale. With Hrizn, every piece of content is measurable, attributable, and optimized for ongoing improvement… so teams can move fast, stay accountable, and grow smarter with every publish.

5. How do you ensure the “helpful content” standard that aligns with Google’s evolving search algorithms?

At Hrizn, “helpful content” isn’t a buzzword… it’s a foundational principle. As Google continues to evolve its Helpful Content System and strengthen its policies against spam, thin content, and AI abuse, we’ve built a platform that not only aligns with these guidelines - but anticipates them.

Every piece of content generated by Hrizn is pushed through a rigorous, multi-layered quality assurance process that includes a wide range of proprietary automated checks and validations. This system ensures that each piece of content is:

●     Unique and free from plagiarism or duplication across internal and external sources

●     Factually accurate, drawing from dealership data and trusted contextual sources

●     Optimized for the specific content type in line with Google’s most recent guidance

●     Compliant with spam and quality policies, including those targeting scaled AI content abuse

Beyond these automated checks, our system leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to ground content in real dealership inputs like inventory data, backlink training, service relevance, and brand documentation reducing the risk of hallucinated or off-brand outputs from language models. Structured data and schema markup are embedded directly into the content where applicable to further signal credibility, relevance, and utility to search engines.

Additionally, Hrizn gives users the ability to review, edit, and collaborate on content before it goes live, allowing for human oversight when needed. Because we truly believe that “human plus AI” exponentially outperforms either of the two parts alone… especially for regulated or nuanced subject matter.

We built Hrizn not just to scale content, but to scale trustworthy content. That means continuously evolving alongside Google, protecting our partners from compliance risks, and ensuring the content we publish is always built to perform, and to last.

6. How do you see yourself evolving in the face of new search paradigms like AI Overviews and Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

We view the rise of AI-native search, through features like Google’s SGE and AI Overviews, not as a disruption, but as a generational opportunity. These new paradigms are prioritizing answers over links, meaning content must be structured, semantically rich, and contextually aligned with real user intent. Hrizn is uniquely built for that future.

Our platform is already grounded in the principles that AI-driven search rewards: content that’s authoritative, purposeful, and tightly mapped to high-intent queries. As SGE becomes more prominent, we’re continuing to evolve by investing heavily in zero-click optimization… generating content that’s not just rank-worthy, but reference-worthy within the AI answer layer itself.

We’re actively developing tools that help our partners create and test content designed specifically for these emerging surfaces, like snippet-optimized summaries, question-based content objects, and structured data enhancements that send strong trust signals to search engines. We’re not trying to outsmart the algorithm, we’re building the infrastructure to feed it.

The dealers and agencies that win in this new landscape will be those who own their content layer and have the ability to adapt in real time. That’s exactly what Hrizn enables. We’re not chasing trends… we’re building the connective tissue between intent, inventory, and intelligent content delivery.

SGE is just the beginning. The future of search is generative, and Hrizn is engineered to lead it.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.