Using AI-creators to produce UGC videos at scale and decrease CPA by 37%.

ViX is the first large-scale global streaming service to exclusively serve the Spanish-speaking world. Owned by TelevisaUnivision, ViX celebrates Latin cultures and storytellers with over 80,000 hours of Spanish-language content spanning genres and formats, including movies and series, novelas, comedies, dramas as well as an unmatched portfolio of live news and sports. 

Every streaming app that aims to become global needs to attract millions of users showing a broad range of content. To do so, ViX was running paid acquisition campaigns on social channels, creating video ads that featured its vast repertoire of content.

Their paid media social team wanted to innovate how they created, tested and optimized video assets in their user acquisition campaigns. More specifically, they wanted to produce highly personalized UGC (User Generated Content) video ads at scale on Meta, and measure how this strategy impacted acquisition of its app subscribers.

That being said, “Personalization”, “scale” and ”video creation” are not words that you often find together in the same sentence. That’s probably due to the fact that producing highly personalized UGC content is a timely and human-intensive process. ViX performance team started looking for a content partner that could help them with this creative challenge. 

From RE to AI:

“For a UGC strategy to be successful, you need to find the right creator, brief them with your brand message, work on a script together, record the video, and finally  post-edit the content. This process can take a minimum of 4-5 days only for one video concept. Creating multiple variations and iterating UGC videos requires re-shooting, re-editing…re-everything”. explained Sofia Smolar, Content Solution expert at Winclap Creative Studio when faced with ViX team’s challenge. 

But what if we change the “RE” for “AI”? Using AI-generative tools, we can enhance videos recorded by a real creator, to produce variations that preserve its authentic UGC look.

“We can use AI to combine previously recorded video elements to make new videos. This  will save substantial time and money in re-shootings and re-editions. The best part, we will still be producing content with real humans”, added Federico España, Content Specialist from the AI-hub team at Winclap.

Although they liked the idea of producing highly personalized variations at scale, the ViX team was even more surprised by the final quality of the content than they had anticipated. As of the beginning of 2024, a lot of generative AI tools in the market were still proof of concepts, with many of their promising use cases under development. Image and video AI-productions still required a lot of improvement to assimilate the quality of work done by human creative experts. ViX knew that UGC-like ads had been ruling in social media due to its authentic look. Hence, using AI-creators needed to be more than prompting a pre-built AI-avatar. It needed to look like a human.  Furthermore, with some AI use cases recently raising controversy (examples of seven-figured AI generated humans were a recurring image around the internet), ViX team was worried that if the quality of the content was not there, it could backfire with its audience.  

They decided to give it a try. Well not a try, a test.

From UGC to AI-UGC: 

Finding the right human: 

Winclap Creative studio has been building their own Creators Community platform, where they recruit creators based on their talent. With the proliferation of generative AI tools, the Studio summoned some of those creators to become part of a new solution: let a creator’s AI-version work for brands. 

Cata, 24 year old, blood-pumping creator, has been creating content for brands since december 2023. She was used to getting called by the Winclap team to record UGC videos. 

However, when the phone ranged, it  was a different kind of project.

“When Winclap called me, they told me that I had to go to the studio to record 40 videos in one day to create an AI-version of me”, explained Cata, and continue:
“It was only after they finished explaining the entire process, and how this required a lot of (human) creativity, that I understood how this would actually impact my work as a creator. ‘So, AI is not replacing me as a creator’, I thought, AI is helping me to produce more content that, otherwise, would be impossible for me to produce on my own.”

With this full video production recorded, an AI-content specialist from WCS used generative tools to combine these resources producing multiple video variations. Different movements and words were combined to produce ViX ads testing multiples copies, background and captions. All of this using the AI creator version of Cata. Before, using only human creators, a reshoot that required changing only a script in a video would take several days to produce. Now, using AI + creators the team could produce creative variations in minutes. This allowed ViX to adapt its content almost in real time. The team analyzed social media reactions to its first videos and used comments as insights to iterate new versions of ads.

For example: ViX could create videos promoting a new series or reacting to a  trend in just one day making the ads more relevant, and thus, more engaging with the user.

A Leap of Test:

ViX content team was bold enough to use AI but smart enough to test it.
Together with Winclap Creative Studio, they created a series of tests comparing traditional videos made in house by ViX against AI-creator videos made in conjunction with WCS.

This way they could prove the efficiency of including in their AI- vs. Non-AI creative assets against impact on cost of acquiring subscribers (SVOD).

Overall, the team was excited to see that including AI- content provided better results with less budget and in a fraction of the time:

AI as a complement, not a replacement.

ViX Paid Social team continues using traditional video assets, UGC and AI-UGC elements on their always-on campaigns. Adding new creative elements allows to produce more volume of hyper personalized content, when it makes sense. 

“Using AI has been a great complement for ViX creative strategy. The team is producing and testing more content than they have ever imagined. However, AI is not going to replace traditional videos or human creators, it’s just another tool in the box. The key is to know when it is time to use it.” claims Paula Endrizzi, Content Specialist and AI-hub Project Manager.  

For ViX, the use of AI is now part of their always-on creative campaigns.
“We are thrilled that leveraging AI for ViX creatives production has proven to be a powerful and effective solution for improving our key KPIs, consolidating our market position, and enhancing user satisfaction.”  Claimed Victor Roberto Ortiz, Sr. Manager  Paid Social Media.

Human creativity is still the cornerstone of producing content that resonates with the audience. It doesn’t get more real than that.