Video content has undoubtedly taken the digital landscape by storm, and according to studies, 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide have named video as the content with the best ROI. In today’s edition of Content Marketing Rockstars, we chat with Derek Tan from Viddsee as he gives us his insights on video storytelling.

Give us an elevator pitch of your business.

Derek: Viddsee is a video entertainment platform for short premium movies, documentaries and web-series. With data insights for creation and marketing from our distribution to an audience, we produce, distribute and market content natively to a targeted audience.

What inspired you to start Viddsee?

Derek: As filmmakers, my co-founder Jian and I saw an increasing gap in video storytelling and the shifting online content consumption on platforms 4 years back. And we wanted to build an accessible online platform for filmmakers to share their stories, and build a community around storytellers and audience to spread awesome local stories globally.

What’s the main difference between Viddsee and other video publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo?

Derek: We love what YouTube has enabled for content creation globally, and it has similarly created opportunities for us to be able to reach audiences directly with our content. We focus on building a video community, with editorial around the films and filmmakers, AMAs with filmmakers, subtitling communities with audiences, giveaways by asking audiences to share their own voice and stories, offline engagement with filmmakers via our Viddsee Juree and Shortee programmes, etc.

On the business front (elaborated in the next question), our business models are also very different. YouTube (as part of Google) scales with programmatic advertising, Vimeo in hosting and pro-tools for creators and Viddsee with content commissioning and native advertising.

How does Viddsee monetise?

Derek: As we grew our platform and community, we saw how audiences engage with authentic stories and how they amplify such voices. Films are social, we talk about the content we watch with family and friends, with colleagues over watercooler talks, on online forums, etc.

Hence we wanted to move advertising beyond interruptions, and use branded content marketing as a way to engage the audience with stories and empower them to advocate the stories. E.g. a story on domestic worker abuse seeded to the regional Viddsee audience, and then amplified to over 150M views worldwide to drive the objectives for the organisation IOMX. In short, we monetise by working with brands to use our data insights to drive content commissioning and native amplification.

What valuable insights would you give businesses or organisations looking to incorporate videos into their Content Marketing mix?

Derek: Telling stories with video drives up completion rates of longer form videos and creates very strong organic engagement around the topics and characters in the story universe created. Companies can then leverage this story universe to drive strong earned amplification and use this engagement to drive brand lift, loyalty and buying decisions with their community.

Telling stories with video drives up completion rates of longer form videos and creates very strong organic engagement around the topics and characters in the story universe created.

What do you think is the future of Content Marketing?

Derek: Building communities and engaging them with stories. And then empowering audiences to amplify their own voice to their own micro networks.

Besides your work, what else are you passionate about?

Derek: As an entrepreneur, I think we combine our passion for work and life. Using storytelling to create a dent in the universe, to inspire people globally and to give communities a voice. And developing an audience for local content.

How can people connect with you/your business?

Derek: Companies can work with us to commission filmmakers to tell stories – either thru original or branded ideas and/or use our platform to drive native amplification using stories to our audience. They can learn more here: www.viddsee.com/partners