Photography & Video Archives Photography & Video

Jan 6 2025

Ecommerce SMBs Need Faceless Videos

So-called “faceless videos” use voiceovers, animations, and images to tell a story, educate, or entertain. In the ecommerce context, these relatively easy-to-make videos promote items and build trust.

Video is an excellent way to showcase products and convert shoppers. Enterprise retailers often place videos on ecommerce pages, social media, and ads.

The only drawback is production. Compared to a blog post or a text-based search ad, videos are expensive to produce and require a much higher skill level. Thus some small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses avoid videos altogether.

AI-enabled Faceless Video

Online merchants produced “faceless” videos before the term became a buzzword. Tools such as Animoto have facilitated such videos for 15 years, as in the recent example below.

These tools make creating a video much easier, but the video-production bar was still above some merchant’s reach. Fortunately, generative artificial intelligence has made faceless video production achievable for nearly every ecommerce business.

Consider a faceless video workflow.

Idea generation. Generative AI models — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok — can help create faceless video ideas.

Scripting and storyboarding. AI tools such as Jasper and Copy.ai feature script writing, although many other AI models can compose video scripts.

Gathering visuals. For this step, an ecommerce business might use product images in combination with AI-generated pictures or video from tools such as Midjourney, Grok, or Pika.

Recording the voiceover. This might be an actual recording or AI-generated audio from ElevenLabs, Murf.ai, and others.

Video editing. Use AI, humans, or a combination.

Generative AI can help throughout the process. Multiple AI-powered platforms perform almost all these steps based on a prompt or two.

Why Faceless Videos?

AI makes creating faceless ecommerce videos nearly as easy as asking ChatGPT to rewrite some Google Ads copy. But why should online merchants use such videos at all?

The answer is more sales — in five ways.

Video advertising. Most common digital advertising platforms, from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to Snapchat and Google Ads, support video formats. These platforms report that video in ads boosts performance. A 2023 Meta analysis showed a 35% improvement in clicks for vertical Reels ads containing video with audio.

Showcase products. Videos showing and describing a product and its features can appear directly on its detailed web page. This common practice boosts conversations. With an automated workflow employing Zapier (or similar) and generative AI tools described above, a merchant could generate a faceless product video for every item in a store.

Customer service. The same AI-enabled workflow for products could also generate customer service videos addressing, say, return policies or frequently asked questions.

Content marketing. Several AI tools can convert a blog post or product description into a faceless video, which merchants can embed on the item’s page or distribute via YouTube.

Social media marketing. Finally, videos drive modern social media marketing, and faceless versions — in full or excerpted into vertical shorts — can work on just about every platform, from YouTube to Meta.

Faceless or Humans?

Faceless videos are not perfect.

Some users report that faceless versions do not build trust as well as a human speaker. A person saying, “Hi, I am Bob Smith, and I want to tell you why I love this product,” carries more emotional clout than a voiceover.

Plus, some social media platforms — TikTok, in particular — favor videos with humans such as influencers talking directly into the camera.

Nonetheless, faceless videos can help ecommerce shops improve advertising performance, showcase products, provide customer information, and produce engaging content.

And thanks to ever-improving AI, this type of video is relatively easy to produce.

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May 25 2024

Flair.ai Remakes Product Photography

Mickey Friedman co-launched Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys artificial intelligence to perfect product photos, providing entire virtual scenes and setups.

The process, she says, remakes ecommerce photography by dramatically lowering the cost of photo shoots while improving quality.

In our recent conversation, she addressed the rise of visual AI, the necessity of human intervention, and more. The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Who the heck are you?

Mickey Friedman: I own a company called Flair. We launched in 2023. We’re building an AI tool for product photos, visualizations, and animations. We’re trying to streamline the photo shoot process into an easy-to-use virtual studio at a much lower cost.

We’re a team of five. We’ve onboarded over a million users now.

We start with merchants’ existing product photos. We perform color corrections, preserve the lettering, and provide an entire virtual scene. Brand and text preservation are important to us.

I was early on in the AI art scene. I was interested in marketing and photo shoots, but I was more drawn to the creative process, playing around with AI models to create art. The process in the early days was taking a bit of text and generating images. There’s still a place for that, such as Midjourney. But ecommerce companies want to preserve their brands and assets and control the visual arrangement of their scenes.

Bandholz: How are merchants using your tool thus far?

Friedman: Images for landing pages and organic social posts are very popular. We’re trying to define the creative process of a photo shoot. Many AI tools remove humans from that process, but we want the opposite, where our customers execute whatever vision they have.

Folks who gravitate to Flair are often at the intersection of ecommerce and creativity — an in-house design team or an agency. They understand our platform intuitively.

There’s a lot of storyboarding on Flair. We’ve had customers with a vision of a dream photo shoot they can’t execute because of extensive coordination and cost. Using Flair, they upload the raw product photos to the canvas, find the props they need, and more or less replicate their photo shoot on the platform.

Bandholz: Flair seems poised to scale.

Friedman: It is a very large market. We want every brand in the world to use us in some capacity. Smaller brands with budget constraints could transition photo shoots, while larger brands that can afford photo shoots need better tools.

Regardless, as long as businesses require photo shoots, Flair will hopefully be involved in their workflow. That’s our goal.

We’re branching out into verticals. For fashion brands, we can place a sweater on a virtual human model, for example. For product commercials, we reduce the cost.

We want as much traction as possible with smaller brands. But we will likely move upmarket a bit, although we’ll never be too expensive — way less than $500 a month.

Over time, our AI models will improve, thus improving image quality. Eventually, we will create banner ads. Everything will be AI-generated. My only hope is that humans are at the center of that process. They direct it instead of a black box algorithm.

Bandholz: Where can people sign up for Flair and follow you?

Friedman: The platform is Flair.ai. You can add me on LinkedIn or follow me on X, @mickeyxfriedman.

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Mar 5 2024

AI Tools for Video Captions

Video captions are text overlays of spoken dialog. Captions drive retention, learning, accessibility, and engagement. They also provide text for search engine bots, elevating rankings.

YouTube generates captions automatically when requested by a viewer, but they aren’t edited and don’t otherwise emphasize the key points. Social media videos are silent. Without captions, viewers may not understand a video and thus scroll past it.

Video captions used to take a lot of time, but with AI the task is automated. Here are three AI-driven tools to produce engaging video captions.

Veed.io

Veed.io generates AI-powered captions automatically.

Veed.io is an online video editor with built-in AI-powered captioning. To use, upload a video and click “Subtitles.” Then click “Automatically generate subtitles.” Clicking “Add automatic highlighting” will highlight every word as it is spoken. You can style captions (i.e., subtitles) and translate them into most any language.

Veed.io also provides tools to improve videos, such as resizing and kits for consistent branding across channels.

Veed.io is free for unlimited captioning with a watermark. Downloading watermark-free videos requires a paid plan starting at $25 per month for 60 minutes of captions.

Klap

Klap breaks long videos into short episodes with captions, suitable for Instagram and TikTok.

Klap automatically breaks long videos into short episodes, each with captions. It’s handy for publishing on Instagram and TikTok.

Each episode can be shortened or lengthened, but the initial versions required minimum editing in my testing. Klap assigns a “variety” score to each episode — an estimate of its social media shares.

Pricing for Klap starts at $29 per month for 10 videos of 45 minutes each and 100 clips.

Kapwing

Kapwing’s video editing tool provides automatic AI-driven captions.

Kapwing is a video editing tool with AI-driven captioning and additional helpful features, such as:

Trim with transcript: Cut unwanted parts of a video by deleting text.
Repurpose project: Find the best clips from a long video (similar to Klap).
Remove filler words such as “um” and “uh.”

Kapwing’s free plan provides 10 minutes of monthly video captions, downloadable with a watermark. Paid plans start at $24 per month for 300 minutes of monthly captions without watermarks.

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