The future of communication is going to be video first: Ashray Malhotra, Rephrase.ai

Digital media has, in the last decade, seen a big revolution in terms of technology. Companies like Rephrase.ai have stretched the frontiers of tech and brands are digging it.

By using deep tech generative AI technology to create videos for brands wanting growth and engagement, Rephrase.ai helps them communicate with their customers through avatars of real human beings, giving brands a personal touch.

The company uses hyper-personalisation and innovative tools of deep learning and artificial intelligence so that the brand's videos reach specific consumers.

Founded in 2019 by Ashray Malhotra, Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla, the company now boasts of a 50-plus clientele, which includes Amazon, Mondelez, PwC, and Johnson & Johnson among a few others.

It is most notable for its Cadbury campaign with Ogilvy and Shah Rukh Khan, where small business players across the country received a personalized video of Shahrukh Rukh Khan endorsing their store, all through the help of artificial intelligence.

In conversation with e4m, Rephrase.ai's co-founder and CEO Ashray Malhotra talks about the company's journey, the good and bad of hyper-personalisation and the future of digital marketing.

Vision and technology

Malhotra speaks about the vision of the company and what they do to help brands build a relationship with their customers. "We have been working in the generative AI space for over four years now. It's because we believe that there is a whitespace with enterprises, in terms of the way they create video content," he notes.

The future of communication, he believes, will be video first. "They've already seen that in the consumer journey, tools like Snapchat, Instagram or Tik Tok make video creation really simple for consumers but that changes the expectation that consumers have from enterprises. Enterprises still create video content today exactly the same way as they used to do, basically forever. And hence, we built a tool which can take just text as input, and make video creation really, really simple for companies," Malhotra points out. 

He also highlights that the largest use case of Rephrase's endeavours is humanising communications, helping brands connect with any important stakeholder one-on-one.

"The best way of communicating with someone is to meet that person. Say if I were the CEO of a real estate company, I would love to go to every single customer and sell the house myself. But if that's not possible, what's the next best way? Communicate video first," he emphasises.

"Videos are from text and images, and for the message to be hyper-personalized for every single person. This is where the Rephrase technology comes in. Once we have recorded a few minutes of a person's face and voice, we are able to create a digital clone of themselves, then help create millions of personalized videos, each for every employee, for every retailer, and distributor, depending on whatever might be the priority for them,” he adds.

The boon and bane of hyper-personalisation

Hyper personalization has a lot of different views from marketers, brands and consumers. Malhotra gives a picture of what he thinks could be the advantage and the challenges around the new technology.

“The primary advantage of hyper-personalisation is the fact that you treat people as people and communicate them with through videos. They don't feel as if they're a number in a database. And that's a primary advantage because people will come back more to your website, leading to higher upsell rates and higher listening rates. The primary advantage is that people feel special if you communicate with them as real humans," he notes.

Despite the merits, hyper-personalisation also comes with its set of challenges. For starters, the technology is relatively new, according to Malhotra. "There are some use cases that we can do today but there are a lot of other things that we will be rolling out in the next few quarters or the next few years. So, the first challenge, is that the technology doesn't exist. Secondly, this is a very powerful technology that needs to be handled very carefully. So, in the wrong hands, it can do more harm than good.”

Future of digital marketing

Malhotra speaks about how the world of marketing has changed over the years and what seems to be the next big thing in the space of digital marketing.

“We think over time marketing has evolved. Thirty-Forty years back it was all about newspapers and then TVs came into the picture. So, for the first time, we were able to communicate in a video format. Then social came into being at a point and that's what made the whole digital revolution possible. For the first time, we are seeing marketers face multiple headwinds. First, privacy regulations across the world are increasing. The third-party cookies will at some point go away, Apple’s privacy regulations are asking me to not track the users and many other things basically starting to lead to worse targeting, hence, significantly higher CTRs. The privacy regulations are not going to be any more lenient in the next years, they are going to be stricter over time.

So, the writing on the wall is clear. We believe that there'll be a new category of marketing, referred to as first-party database marketing. Their plans in order to communicate with people themselves are based on the data that they have, which could include things like shoppers’ data, and different geographical constraints, not just the cohort-based targeting that we're used to. In this era of first-party databases, there will be a completely new way of communicating with customers and to the best of our understanding today, it is going to be hyper-personalized videos. So that's like the global change marketing paradigm that we see happening.”