228 | Is UCG Dead? Learn How To Build a Video Content Machine - 88% Higher Conversions, 97% Lower Costs with Donny Dvorin of MakeUGC

0:00Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast. the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I am really, really excited today. I'm really excited for several different reasons. Reason number one, we are back doing live shows. I miss this so much. It's been a few weeks, and we were out all the month of July, but it's going to be happening more or less every week moving forward as we did for the last two plus years, unless I'm traveling for business, which is actually happening a lot in October.

0:36So I hope I'm not traveling on any of these Thursdays, but we'll see. But the second reason that I'm excited is we're going to talk about something that is dear to my heart, which is sales and marketing. And video has been the most relevant way to connect with people other than meeting them face to face when it comes to sales and marketing. And why was video so successful? Because it's the closest thing to real life. If you want to drive people to take action, the best way to do this is to generate some emotional connection with them. And the best way to do this, again, other than real life, is a video.

1:12Some would say that video is even better because you can add sound and you can have titles and you can create the exact theme and atmosphere that you want and so on. Now, there's multiple kinds of videos that can help you connect with people, but the most successful one that basically took over our lives in the last decade or so is testimonials and genuine reviews of products and services by actual people, also known as user-generated content, also known as UGC. So we became used to that. Now, most of the UGC content is actual people who are really genuinely just want to review stuff and they have a channel on a specific topic and they share stuff.

1:54I'm one of these people, right? but there are obviously finance or promoted channels. So companies will approach different influencers and say, hey, we're going to pay you X or we're going to give you Y and you're going to promote our product. So that has existed for a while as well. That's why really successful influencers make a lot of money because brands will pay them to get to their audience. But still, most, I think, of this content is actual genuine people sharing just what they want to share about a specific product. and so on. Now, the tricky part, if you're a brand, is finding those people, finding relevant influencers and having them say what they need to say in a way that will actually allow you to scale what you want to scale and do it in a predictable way while controlling the narrative and knows what actually is going to happen in those videos.

2:45The appearance of AI avatars opens the opportunity to do this using AI. Now, this creates a crazy, amazing opportunity to generate user-generated content. With AI, it also generates a huge risk for the entire UGC universe. And we're going to talk about that as well in this episode. But I have been using and covering AI avatar platforms for probably two years, maybe more. However, two weeks ago, I was exposed to a new platform that literally blew my mind on how good it is. So I have avatars of myself. I've been using avatars from several different platforms to different things. And this platform is in a completely different level as far as generating genuine user-looking, completely unscripted environment kind of videos that look completely realistic.

3:42The platform is called MakeUGC. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while or watching our YouTube channel, you know I don't promote platforms. I never do unless it's like, holy crap, people need to know about this. So this is one of these cases. So our guest today, Donnie Dvorin is the chief revenue officer of MakeUGC. I reached out to him and said, listen, I want people to know about your platform. I want to know what are the use cases. I want you to show exactly how to build these avatars and what could be the potential output. and so this is exactly what we're going to show you today.

4:14We're going to show you different use cases. We're going to show you examples. We're going to show you how to actually build these avatars for your brand or for yourself or for whatever needs you have and we're going to have the uncomfortable conversation what the hell that means for the future of video and content and will people want to consume it or not. So lots of great stuff to discuss and hence, as I mentioned, I'm really excited about this episode And I would like to welcome Donnie to the show. Donnie, welcome to Leveraging AI.

4:47In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Matis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

5:27Isar, thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. What a beautiful intro you had. Loved every word of it. Thank you. This is what I do. From now, it's your problem. I have to do a good intro and then the guest needs to carry us forward. Before we dive into your stuff, I really want to thank the audience. So those of you who are joining us on Zoom or those of you who are joining us on LinkedIn Live, I really appreciate you being here. If you would like, and I suggest, introduce yourself, say where you're from, what you're trying to get out of this, that will help us maybe drive the conversation in the right direction.

6:02And in addition, if you are on Zoom, then share your LinkedIn profile so people can find you as well. And again, thank you for being here. For now, Donnie, I think the best thing would be for people to even understand what we're talking about is before we even start talking about the company and all that kind of stuff, let's just show a couple of demos so people see what I saw before I reached out to you and why I think this is so unique. Sure. Yeah. So I can go right into that. Sometimes I explain why this makes sense, but let's just do that. Let's go right into a demo and show you how it works.

6:42So right now I'm in the MakeUGC platform over here. So this is just at makeugc.ai. And there's a couple of different tools that you can see. There's product in hand. there's creating an avatar video there's make your own avatar like you sir just said creating b-roll video make your own voice and you can do editing over over here and even like add some gestures but as an example if i go over here and i go to create now i can literally go in here and i can type in whatever i want and say like make me a product of somebody holding a suntan lotion and then I can literally come over here and upload your image or choose from one of MakeUGC's avatar.

7:29And just to show you what that looks like, yesterday I was on a call with a company in India and they have a suntale lotion that said, make me an avatar of an Indian actor. He's 30, he's holding a bottle of sunscreen. And you can see it just generated this image right here. And then you can select that image over here. You can put in what the person says, and then you can turn into a talking actor. And so just to show you that like almost in real time and do a little bit of like kind of Martha Stewart on this, but I can say like, you know, make him laugh and, you know, say how much he loves this suntan lotion, et cetera, et cetera.

8:07And then I click out of here and I, you know, it takes like a couple of minutes and just for time purposes, I come over here and I can play. I love this suntan lotion. It's the best suntan lotion I've ever used. So you can see right there, and he's the sound plate, everything you saw perfectly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll say why I find this so incredible and so different than other avatar platforms. The fact that it looks raw, you can hear the waves in the background and the wind blowing as if he's shooting it with an iPhone. His movement looks completely realistic. His hair looks like there's really no way to tell this is not a real video.

8:52And because it's so raw, it looks real. There's kids running in the background and you can't really tell where he is, but it sounds like he's at the beach doing this video. And the fact that the quality is actually not great is what makes it great. Like it is as if you would have shot this with your phone. And so it's a great example, right? Within five seconds or 20 seconds, you generated an image that fits the character that you need. Then you added text and you have a video that you can actually use. I do have an interesting question though. Can I use the actual santan lotion, which is obviously important?

9:30Can I use the actual product somehow in the video? Yeah, absolutely. And so just to show you something like over here, if I go to, like, if I want to have the product in hand, I'll show you one over here. Let me just, so like, you see how this like mushroom gummies, what's this brand? Akka way or whatever. So literally we just go to the website. We do a screenshot of the product. product, I come back over when I was over here and I go to create now and I just click this little button that says add image. It says upload your image. And then when I upload the image, I don't know if you can see the little thing that comes up, but it basically I can go and choose the image and then I can come over here and I can choose one of our make UGC avatars and then match it together or the AI can create its own avatar like I did in some of these.

10:29So absolutely. And then just to go back over here, just to play you what this sounds like. Looking for a natural way to enhance focus, boost your immune system and support overall wellbeing. The thing I love about this one is like, if you would ask me like two, three, four weeks ago, show me this types of videos, it was hit or miss with the lip syncing. It was just like where the AI was at that time. And over the past week or so, the lip syncing has gotten so good that you can't even tell the difference. The other thing I would say that's also improved over the past week, and that's how AI is moving so damn fast, is the emotions.

11:13You couldn't really have a lot of emotions, but like look at there's no sound on this one but look at anger right here like that's anger and that's again for those of you just listening to this it's crazy like there's a guy behind a microphone and you see that he's really upset and you see that he's shouting again we couldn't hear anything but the expressions look very real and very extreme yeah and this one is for crying and so yeah so like that's the biggest two improvements is the lip syncing is near perfection. And then with some editing and when you have B-roll footage, like I can show you what types of edited ads look like, and then I'll go back into the platform.

11:55But when you're doing something like this, there's not enough time for like the human eye to even think for a second that they're not real people. And even if it was a full 30 seconds with it, you can't even tell. But this is like some good editing that I'll show you right here. This is a car scratch removal kit. And if you've ever tried to sell a car with scratches or paint marks, you know this could save you thousands. It's so simple, anyone can do it. The two-formula system works like this. O2 removes scratches, while O3 seals and protects. So I won't play the whole thing, but the idea is that you have two different AI actors going back and forth.

12:30You have B-roll footage, and that's real footage. They had some Google Drive or Dropbox with just hours and hours of footage that they've shot. Most brands have that. If they don't, we can just go to like a Getty images of B-roll footage and grab some. And then we add music. We put captions in there. And we make a TV, not TV commercial, but we make a good social media commercial that you literally, you know, it would cost you hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And we're at a fraction of the price. Interesting. Okay. So perfect. Now we got a few examples and let me explain for the game of people just listening what we saw.

13:14We saw a platform that with a few clicks allows you to upload a product, any product, choose an image of an avatar or upload an image of any person and then generate videos that shows the actual product accurately without morphing while keeping it intact and looks completely realistic to talk and say anything you want about the product. Then the next level beyond that is an edited version of the same thing where you add B-roll. For those of you not in the professional video universe, it means other video that is not the person, right? So in this particular case, you could see a car and the person working on the car and cleaning and buffing it up.

13:58So that's a B-roll. That's a piece of video that was not part of the avatar. But the combination of the avatar video, either as a full screen or as a pop-up window while the rest of the B-roll is running, makes it look like a completely professional ad. So this is, I assume, I'm not going to jump into in conclusion, a mix of software and service, the editing part of it? Exactly right. So there are no, to my knowledge and our company's knowledge, no really good editing softwares that use AI that can output things that are as good as like that car scratching removal kit. So what usually happens is, and just to show you like one other piece of the demo that either a client or us on behalf of the client, if they buy like a done for you service, come in here, they write the script or they use our AI script writer or just use chat GPT.

14:59I mean, nowadays it's like you go to chat and it's like, give me 20 different scripts for this website, make some funny, make some, you know, testimonial, whatever. It gives you a bunch of scripts, or you could use our tool right here. You put in that, that, that script, and then you go and you choose the actor over here and there's over 400 different actors and you can choose male, female, you can choose their age, the type of skin, what location that they're in, you know, anything that you want. And then you choose a bunch of those actors to match, to say that script. And then you can come over here and you can mess around with their clarity, their tone, the emotion, the speed.

15:43then you generate the voice. Also, we have over 40 different languages. You can come down here and choose a different language. Some will say, like I had a call last week with a company in Saudi Arabia, and they had five different dialects of Arabic. Now, do we have all five dialects of Arabic in the system? No. But what they can easily do is, I said, do you know people in each one of those regions? Oh, of course we do. So just have them upload a voice and then it just matches that dialect, matches their voice. And then we also have - So it can do a lip sync on an existing audio file. Yeah. And you just put in like that language, you just type it with whatever language.

16:29And then some have said, oh, but I've already created like a hundred different languages in 11 labs. I didn't know about you guys. Great. So we have an 11 labs integration and you just upload your voices right from 11 labs. And kind of that's what like they're known for. So, you know, but I'm not trying to compete with that. You can just integrate it with it. And so once you do that and you choose all them, then you generate the voice, which matches this voice with the script that I had put in. You can regenerate it unlimited times. And then once you're happy with it, you literally hit generate video.

17:05And then a few minutes later, it comes up in this folder over here where all the videos. And so to answer your question, Isar, all of this is like the AI portion of it, where you're going click, click, a few minutes later, you have the raw video with either the person holding the product and talking, or just the avatar talking to it. And then you go to like a private Slack channel, you give them access to, your folder where you made the videos. And then a human comes in and does the editing and will say, okay, what B-roll footage, what type of music do you want, et cetera, et cetera. And then 24 to 48 hours later, a brand can have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 videos that are all edited, ready to put onto Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

17:56Wow. Okay. So I want to talk about two things. So first of all, let me do a quick summary. The world in which we knew what videos were human and which are not is gone. Do you agree with that? Yes, if you really pay attention and you try to pick it apart and you find the exact video at the right seconds, you might be able to tell the difference. That probably is not going to exist six months from now. But I think for the majority of people, even looking at it right now, they can't tell the difference. Do you agree? I agree. I showed it to my kids and they could not tell the difference. So this is number one.

18:39There's really no way to differentiate anymore between AI people and actual people when it comes to video that is generated that's circling around. That means that we need to question literally everything we see online, because this could be a piece of news, right? It doesn't have to be a user-generated content. I could see a news anchor reporting the news with the B-roll and everything and so on, and it's not going to be an actual piece of news. It's going to be a piece of news that somebody fabricated, for lack of a better term. The same thing, any promotional materials and so on. So I want to talk about two different implications of what I just said.

19:24Number one is what are the use cases you're seeing company use this for right now, right? So that anybody who's listening or watching to this understands that they can generate these videos in minutes. They can get a much better video a day later when your team edits that. What kind of cool use cases, other than I'm going to promote this product, have you seen companies, brands, individuals use this for. And then we're going to talk about what that actually means for the future of this kind of content. But let's start with the first one of like, what are cool use cases that you've seen people do?

19:55Yeah. So, you know, I can kind of start with like case studies and then I can go into different use cases too. So like we have this, there was a cookbook called Glad Bites and the cookbook sold for$10 a cookbook. It was the recipes were generated by AI, the pictures of the food AI in the videos AI, obviously using our platform. They were generating like 500 to a thousand videos a month. and what they did was, you know, it's a little like a gray area, but they did 205 TikTok burner accounts where you can basically create an AI actor for each Instagram or TikTok account. And that person, you know, that actor has a whole personality.

20:47They like to ski, they like their pets, they like their kids, whatever. But they're also talking about products, just like any other, influencer channel would. And we're giving them the videos to do that. And so in 93 days, they were able to sell$1.6 million of this cookbook because they basically blasted the internet with these videos. The car scratching kit, they're very public about it in their first 30 days running with this, which was just like a tutorial video or whatever, however you want to frame that. They did$69 ,000 in sales in their first 30 days. They spend$19 ,000 on the media side.

21:27So the more you spend on media, but that's a good three to one ROAS. The one that you saw was the number one pick, usually a good e-commerce or brand that has some budgets. We'll do 100 videos a month because like 10 to 15 % will be like the winners. Like they'll be like, oh my God, look at those clicks, the engagements, the purchases, the others. It's not that they're doing bad. They're just not as good as the winners. And so the whole game is put more money down on the ones that are doing really well, get the ROAS and then reinvest in the business by putting more money on more creative and more media, and then try to get to a four to one ROAS, a five to one ROAS, have it pay for itself.

22:19And so like the use cases and the applications of it, it's almost endless. Like I can't think of a category that it doesn't work with. So I will say, okay, make UGCs, we have like over 50 ,000 clients now, there's basically about 500 signups a day. So So it's growing very fast. And about 50 % of them are e-commerce. And 50 % of the 50%, there's like a lot of supplements. Like supplements is a high margin business and it has a subscription. So it's very conducive to this type of like just plowing media dollars and new creative in there and the whole product in hand, which kind of made us like famous at the start is all here.

23:03But the other 50%, I mean, it's, you know, real estate, apps, software, like the cookbook ones. So it's coaches. It's, I mean, it's courses. It's just, it's - So it's not even just products. Like it's products and services, B2B, B2C, the whole anything. Yeah. You know what? Let me, can I show you one more example? Yeah, of course. So this is like Slack as an example. I thought Slack was just group chat for people who say, circle back. Turns out it's a productivity cheat code. We've got channels for everything, marketing, design, random, even lunch orders. Threads keep calling. So the idea here is the common denominator is the guy's voice talking through it, but you're showing like the website.

23:51There's no product in hand. You know, there was one for whatever. I'm not going to show it like I don't want to waste too much time with so many videos, but there's one for Dubai real estate. So they're showing like real estate in Dubai, right? And they have B-roll footage. They have other stock imagery. And so it doesn't have to be a product. It can be any service. It could be an HVAC company, a laundromat. Like anything that is running ads is really a fit. So to add, you know, what are the applications of this? It's like, it's kind of endless. Yeah, I get it. So let's have the other part of the conversation, right?

24:30Right? It's...

24:35Will this... I'm trying to be gentle, but I don't have the right gentle words to say. Will this kill UGC? Meaning, if I'm as a consumer, let's divide this into two timeframes. In the immediate timeframe, it's a huge opportunity, like you said, because nobody knows, or the vast majority of the people don't know. Right? They don't know that this cookbook and the 100 % of the people promoting it do not exist. They think they're buying a cookbook that now everybody on TikTok is talking about. However, within a year, two years, three years, five years, people say, holy crap, like, I don't know. So I'm not going to consume any of that content.

25:18Will this kill the concept? Forget about the UGC itself. Will it kill the concept? Will people stop consuming this content, which means that the algorithms are going to stop liking them, which means it will stop being a thing because it's not real. Yeah. And I could take it like my one word answer is unfortunately, yes, for all those creators and UGC people out there. I would even take it a step further and say, just will the category of AI DIY video in general kill all TV actors or the way commercials are made today. I was just listening to a podcast and it was Mr. Wonderful, Kevin Leary, and he was talking about when he shoots a video, it costs him about$400 ,000 to make a commercial.

26:15and he gets a lot of content out of it, 15, 30, 60 second spots, and they can do a lot of different things with it, but that's a lot of money. And then he started experimenting with AI and he said he basically flew out to Dubai. They had a bunch of green screens. He shot something once and then they made thousands of pieces of content and it was like a fraction of the price. Okay, so let's back it up into just UGC right now because that's commercials. I speak to marketers all day long and I most of the time ask if they're running UGC and how much they're spending on it. And I've heard on the lowest, lowest side,$100 to make a UGC ad.

27:01I'm usually getting numbers around$200,$300, and$400 per UGC ad. And then I've also heard$700,$800,$900,$1 ,000 for an individual ad. With this, it's$50 and that's beautifully edited and it goes down from there depending on volume. And so you compare$50 to an average of, let's say,$250. It's one fifth of the price. But it's not just the cost. The other two elements of it is time. So I ask, how long does it take to produce a UGC ad? And I usually get on the lowest side a week, but it's usually two to three weeks. This is turning it around in 24, 48 hours, maybe at most like 72 hours. It's like, it's very fast and you can do 10, 20, 30 videos and get it back within 48 to 72 hours.

28:01So it's, so that's time. Yeah. And these are the fully edited. It's the one that you just do the avatar. It's almost immediate, right? It's a few minutes. Yeah. It's like three minutes, you know, you're getting, you're getting something that you could use for like testimonials. I wouldn't really use an unedited for paid media, but yeah, for you want to post like a testimonial video to your website? Sure. So there's three things. Number one is the cost that this is like a fifth of the cost on average, if not more. Number two is the time. So it's cutting it in half or by a third or, you know, it could be a month before you get a video back.