36Kr Interview 丨 "Whale's Curtain" Ye Shengliang: AI technology in the live room, through the algorithm to improve the efficiency of consumer reach

2022-09-20 18:16:36

With the booming development of the live streaming industry in the past two years, users' reliance on short-form video continues to deepen, and how to create explosive live streaming rooms and increase live streaming traffic has become a high concern for brands and webmasters. Whale Curtain is a digital marketing company that helps brands improve their live streaming performance by providing AI technology analysis to drive traffic to their live streaming rooms for the purpose of commercial realization.

The core purpose of Whale AI technology is to improve the efficiency of brands' consumer reach. For brands, marketing content is an extremely complex process from production to distribution, and Whale has been focusing on how to make branded content more effective in reaching consumers.

DAM & VAP, new product line debut

Based on content marketing insights, Whale is launching a new line of products at the September launch to help brands better reach consumers.

Digital Asset Management (DAM), a digital asset management platform, focuses on the content production process, using AI technology to help brands produce, manage, stream, distribute and gain data insights for content-driven marketing growth.

The DAM platform has three main functions. The primary one is content management collaboration, using the collaborative editing document feature to allow people in different parts of the content production process to work together to conceptualize and output content, leveraging the platform's advantages to produce live content quickly and efficiently. Whale provides a full suite of content compliance services to ensure that all content complies with advertising laws and contractual requirements prior to the launch of a marketing campaign to avoid unnecessary financial loss to the brand. Finally, Whale also supports brands with data analysis. After the content is placed, Whale will follow up on the changes in clicks and other traffic data to feed the entire content production process and improve production efficiency through the feedback of real data.

Whale's VAP "Video Analytics Platform" is based on DAM and provides structured analysis and visualization of video content through AI algorithms to drive better results in live streaming. Whale's AI technology not only provides the anchor with the live broadcast discourse based on the algorithm's knowledge of the pendant industry, but also provides real-time and synchronized field control services to help the anchor better grasp the pace of the live broadcast. After the live broadcast, VAP technology will review the live content and classify key phrases to create brand-specific marketing content assets.

The essence of the two business lines, DAM and VAP, is to connect the entire process from content production to distribution, from the production of print ads to live content production, Whale's AI technology will provide assisted driving capabilities for brands to ensure that better results can be achieved from live broadcasts.

About Whale

Whale entered the digital marketing circuit in 2017, and as a technology company, Whale's technology R&D staff accounts for 70% of the company's total headcount, and the company's technologies, from hardware, inline, machine vision, data algorithms, product development to experience design, are all self-developed. Whale's founder Ye Shengxuan also comes from a technical background, after graduating from Caltech with a master's degree in computing and neural systems, he joined Facebook to work on data science.

Whale hopes to provide data-driven marketing solutions for consumer goods retailers through innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI), massive IoT and data models to empower sustainable operations for retail brands.

Whale has served more than 400 leading consumer brands including Unilever, Watsons, Sibe, Midea, Bubble Mart, Azure, Carrefour and others.

Q & A Interview content

Q：When did Whale start to focus on the digital marketing track?

Jerry：Whale has been exploring content production systems since 2019, when we identified the need for brands to produce marketing content using AI technology, and we turned our attention to live streaming in 2020, a year when the industry was booming. We noticed that live-streaming had a relatively standardized operational process and used this feature to help brands run their live-streams in a co-driven manner, helping brands to output live-stream content more efficiently.

Q：What are Whale's competitive advantages over other digital marketing agencies?

Jerry：Compared to other digital marketing agencies with a wide range of client sources, Whale currently serves only consumer brands, which gives Whale a deep knowledge of the consumer industry.

Whale has a complete content management system, including all services from content production to distribution. Currently, our AI technology has the ability to collect data and operate collaboratively offline and online at the same time, which is rare in the existing market. In fact, at the brand sales level, there is no distinction between online and offline consumers, and it is also the brand that has always wanted to evaluate its marketing effectiveness from an integrated perspective. We can currently assist brands in marketing from both online and offline channels to gain better insight into consumer needs.

Whale has a strong focus on protecting the data privacy of brands, as most of our clients are large and medium-sized brands. Whale's AI system has been repeatedly polished in terms of data security and data privacy.

Last but not least, Whale is a purely technical company, with 70% of its team made up of technical staff, Whale independently owns three technology platforms - Space Data Platform, Whale Marketing Cloud and Whale Data Cloud - and the entire technology system is developed by the company's own team.

Q：What is Whale's target customer group and market positioning?

Jerry：Whale has business lines at home and abroad, and the platform now runs software in English and Japanese, in addition to the Chinese version used in mainland China, to provide data analysis for overseas enterprises, and nearly 15% of the company's business this year comes from Southeast Asia and Japan.

Whale also helps Chinese companies to provide data analysis services during the process of going abroad, and supports them to reach consumers in overseas markets more efficiently through AI technology on TikTok. The data analytics we provide can provide new perspectives for Chinese companies going abroad, and the data support can help domestic brands understand the preferences of customer preferences and needs in different regional markets to help them further develop overseas markets.

Q：Is there any difference between the technology line serving the overseas business and the domestic one?

Jerrt：I think it is much more difficult to provide services to overseas users and overseas users than to domestic users. Jitterbug is only used in mainland China, Whale is facing a unified market with consistent consumption behavior in China, which is more conducive to finding the characteristics of the pendant track and analyzing users' consumption habits. TikTok, on the other hand, faces a global user base, and there are naturally significant differences in consumption behavior and habits between Southeast Asian and European and American users, which makes Whale's data analysis more difficult on some level.

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