TwentyThree Keynote

Hello everyone and welcome back to VideoDays 2025, the annual event for everyone doing video. I hope you guys are all doing well and welcome. My name is Amelia and I'm so excited that I get the pleasure of being your host here for the next two days as we come together and we help take your video game to the next level. It's the sixth year we'll be bringing everyone doing video together to really share and learn. And I'm very proud to say that we have an amazing lineup for you today and tomorrow. We have six sessions with industry leaders from How can we? Sonic Minds, StoryKit, and Veo Technologies. But let's have a little bit of a sneak peek into the program that we have in store for today and tomorrow. So we'll start off here today at 2 with a very special TwentyThree keynote. To set the stage. Followed by Saxo's video strategy journey. And then at 4, video for complex storytelling. Before we go to the program for tomorrow, December 17th, we'll start off at 2pm, Central European Time, with the audio side of video. Followed by scaling your video efforts. And lastly, wrapping up with state of video report. Now, our belief as a company is that video makes the digital world just a little bit more human and real. So every year we host video days and webinar days and our annual event, TwentyThree Summit, to drive the field forward together. So I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for tuning in during a busy December and invite you guys to get cozy, lean back, and get inspired. I also want to give a very special thank you to our speakers who during the next two days will help thousands of video marketers across organizations, video producers, webinar program managers, and business leaders over the entire world improve their video efforts for 2026. So I'm so excited to get started for today. But first, let me just run you through the platform really quickly. Now, you might notice that you have a questions feature right above the chat. So please use the question features if you want to get your specific question answered by the speaker. It's a golden opportunity to get a little bit more involved in video days. And I'm also curious to know a bit more about you guys. So follow along. And I'm going to start with a chat where you guys are tuning in from in the world. I will start. I am out. And I can't wait to see all the different locations across the globe share where we are all tuning in from. It can also be not geographically where you're located, but what room are you sitting in? Are you at the office these days? Are you working from home? Maybe you're tuning in from a cafe somewhere. I also want to encourage you to share your LinkedIn profiles. We're building a video community and the power of knowing who your peers are is a beautiful chance to connect and to make real connections. So I very much invite you to share your LinkedIn if you want to. And before we get started, I have a very special surprise for all of you today. As a big thank you for contributing. To our video community. Hold on a minute. Because I have a very special gift for all of you that I'm looking very much forward to opening at the end of the day. So I have a special treat in here. So remember to stay tuned until the very end of the day to find out what's in store for your special holiday gift. Now I'm going to leave this here so that you can keep it in mind. Before we present the first session of today. So next up, we have a very special 23 keynote. To set the scene and kick us off here today. Thomas Madsen-McDale, co-founder and CEO of 23, the only European player in the global video software field. Thomas has spent the last 30 years changing how communications, sorry, how organizations communicate with each other. And how they work and drive change. So please welcome and give a warm welcome to the stage. Thomas Madsen-McDale. Thanks, Amelia. And good to see all of you out there in the busy season for this year's Video Days event. The next 30 odd minutes with a lot of room for Q&A in the end. I'll take you through why perhaps this is not a very common event. Because this is not only about video days, but even digital days. How video is the new chapter in digital. And in the end, I'll give you a few tips on how to really go deep on your video efforts with a lot of the tools and methods our Video Accelerator team has been developing in 2025. So. Sometimes the tough thing in life is to go out of your safe zone. Of your safe comfort zone. Of your sunny side of the pond. And look out a little bit on the world that's outside. That's running. The unsafe territory of the new. And that's really where I think we are with video just now. That we're seeing a world where we have a big potential. To not only solve the challenges of video. But also to solve the greater challenges in digital. For this year's launch of our Webinar 6. We called it not just a new chapter in webinars. But a new chapter in digital. Because that was really what it fundamentally was about. And that's the promise I'll try to trick you through today. On webinars, web, content generation and brand. We've come an incredible long way since the ground hay garden scene in 1888. The oldest video that still exists in the world. 25 frames of video. Almost 137 years ago. Back when it was the invention era of video. And even though we might feel in the video world that video is now. And it's happening. And it's driving so much engagement. Up towards 50 to 60% of your overall brand engagement is video based. In video we've never really had this kind of hype cycle. And we can laugh of hype cycle sometimes. Obviously we're currently in a gen-I, A-I hype cycle massively. Where we throw all our constraints, all our limits. And go full on on doing something. But the challenge in video is really fundamentally that we've never had hype cycle. We've been sort of been the number two or three thing. For some 20 odd years at this point. And that obviously compounds majorly to a world where video is so pervasive today. It's everywhere. At every customer touch point. Every type of video. From live to personal to web to social media. And video ultimately is this incredible paradigm we're living in. Together with the computer and the internet connects us all. Video being the major thing. Video being the possibility to teleport yourself. Television. Video is TV. Right? And we can be in a different place with a full bandwidth experience. Almost as good as if we were there in person. Right? It's an incredible powerful technology. But when we look at video we're obviously on the tooling side. Really trying to drive all the integration of all these tools. And mature the product category. But the challenge still remains. And the potential just now in video. That perhaps we're not only fixing video when we're doing something. Perhaps we're even tackling the greater challenges of digital. Perhaps you're actually at digital days just now. And not just video days. So let me run through a few examples of where we're seeing this trend. The first one is webinars. And you might think, oh webinars is just this word web and seminar put together. Nobody knows who invented it in the mid 90s. It's an incredible open term and frame for putting anything into it. But fundamentally. Webinars are the last bit that hadn't been digitalized in the world. Which is event marketing. Creating an event. A meeting. A gathering. A workshop. A conference. Something like you're joining just now here at video days. When we look at our digital engagement model. It's been abundance and always on. I could get anything I wanted at any point in time. And webinars here represents sort of the introduction of events to digital. For the first time ever. So we are seeing a world that's video driven and live. Where that has peaks. Life is a series of events. As some people say. Birth. Marriage. Kids. Death. At the most basic level. So think really about webinars not only as something in itself. But overall challenging and establishing a new frontier in the digital world. That is event driven. And brings the event driven approach into digital. Next up. I really wanted to just highlight a few of the sort of elements of webinars. This year we launched our new webinar six release. The six release since we built the first second generation webinar tool in 2018. With some incredible innovations. To really drive your webinar forwards forward. Until now webinars have been a lot about engagement. But with webinar six you can also drive resource. With action cards you can put forms to sign up. You can put feedback. You can put links in with the banners in them to drive the action you want. So start thinking your webinars as not only great for engagement. Which they are. But also great at getting people to do what you want them to do. Whether it's signing up. Whether it's clicking a link. Or logging into an extranet. Or intranet. Or whatever it might be you're doing. So that's super accessible. And easy to put in. You can even do them when if something pops up. But obviously mostly they're about planning your webinars better. To really drive that conversion. So we're bringing the conversion and the demand perspective a little bit into webinars with action cards. Apart from that we also have great new features for collaboration. Mixed mode. And a great mobile experience. Your webinar always is good. Even from the times you're joining it on the run. The second thing I wanted to highlight as an example of where video people is starting to become the major drivers of digital. Is our great old thing called the web. As somebody who started building websites some 30 years ago. It's incredible to see how far we've come with the web. But also how much we've taken from the web. Because the basic innovation of the web has been to remove the human beings. And make it really easy. It's always on. And you very effectively can do things on your own. You can register a company. You can shop. You can file your taxes. All within minutes. Without talking to a human person. But we're trying to reset in digital just now. Getting the balance right again. Of getting those people into your webinar. Sorry, into your web efforts also. So this year. This year at the 23 Summit. We launched a lot of new tools to make your web video driven and live. Basically reinventing your website. Is perhaps the role of the video people. Because nobody else at least seems to be doing it. Everything on social media is all about video. Live, on demand, shorts. But our websites have been sort of stuck in the same design pattern. The same paradigm for about 20 years at this point. Just with a little bit more fancy design here and there. You as a video person perhaps is the one that should go in and use all your video content. That you've already done all your webinars. And create a different type of web experience. And take the leadership and drive that. That's the possibility now also for video people. To be the people who builds the web. With 23 we got a lot of tools. Video sections. Landing pages. Video pages. Spots. Possibilities for all the types of video players. You can really create easily that all new video driven. Live website. That makes driving more engagement. And makes your website interesting again. Instead of all the action being on the social platforms. With the new release we've also launched live webinar spots. So you can even make your website live. Imagine that your webinars are not running on some landing page somewhere. That nobody can see apart from the people that were invited. But your webinars could also be front and center running on the top of your website. While they're being, while they're live. Or while they're counting down. So we are fundamentally here creating the possibility to build live websites. Websites that are active. Where there's something always happening. There's always a webinar in a few days. There's always something going on. And perhaps it even shows in 30 minutes. I can see a live webinar. So I'll come back in 30 minutes and join. So with live webinar spots you can have all the possibilities of how to build different types of web experiences. For the ways you want to do it. An incredible innovation in the web. And something I encourage all of you to really start thinking about as video people. We've also launched a lot of new developer tools. To make it really easy and interesting to build web tools. With our super simple and powerful WYSIWYG editor. You can build the web experience and tweak it to your needs. You have visual inline editing. You can do video components. And you now also have developer sandbox and version control. So you as a video person really start thinking about. Perhaps you could get a lot more value out of your video content. Perhaps you should start shooting special video content for your website. And go in and talk to your web people. And start imagining a video driven and a live website. Is also now within the realms of the strategic role of the video people. Then we're living in a world that's a lot about generating content. And obviously as video people you are already doing a lot of video content. But there is also so much content you can get from your webinars and your video. So in 23 we've been working a lot on content generation. Out of your existing content. The minute your webinar is done. We are already with the AI support. Have created snippets and shortcuts out of the videos. For you to quickly edit and make to use. Deploy to your team. Put on social platforms. Put on your website. We've also recently launched the possibility to generate any type of content. Out of one video, one webinar or collection of video and webinars. So you can create articles, blog posts, social media snippets, thumbnails, images even. So really start thinking about your video as not only about being about video. But video actually being your content production engine sort of in your organization. So perhaps with video we're not only doing video. We're also doing the input side. So creating great amounts of great content. That also creates a lot of more value out of your existing video content investment. And it's super simple. You just select a video and a webinar. A combination thereof. Playful. You can play around and experiment. Tweak it. You can prompt it in the direction you want it. And then in the end you can copy to tweak it in the last bit. Because obviously that's a hopeful vision for AI. That it will inspire you to do more content and actually edit the last bits out of it. So that's some of the new things we've been working on for really getting going. The last thing I wanted to talk about where we see a huge role for video people also becoming even more strategic. And perhaps really setting putting new chapters together in digital is brand. Because video has been sort of the ugly duckling. The ugly duckling in the design and brand world. The one where you accepted a user experience that was Microsoft's user experience. Or Zoom's or YouTube's. Where in your beautiful branded environment. Your identity. Your home. On the web. You would accept something that was totally off-brand. That was somebody else's element on your website. And that's where we've been for a long time. But with all the capabilities in 23. And our all-new brand studio is really easy to get that right. So we put in a lot of support for building what we call your video brand. The video side of your brand identity. Because you have all the classic elements of a brand. But you also have all the video components that at this point is up towards 50 to 60% of the engagement. So it's really also fixing your brand experience. So that everything is 100% branded. And not only half of it is branded. We build the capabilities directly into the tool. So you can do all the types of video brand elements that defines your brand experience. From the webinar experience to thumbnails. To video player design. Video section. Webinar intros. Thumbnail templates. TV cards that are styled the way you want them. So we're really making 23 even more easy to really brand. And plug and play. We put it all into what we call the brand studio. Where you very easily can define it for your organization. And then it gets deployed across your workspaces and your teams. Into the specific situations of webinars and personal video and everything else. So really think about that. Perhaps video is not really only about video. But it's also about helping drive that brand experience across. So go find your brand people or your designers. Depending on your company size. And get them interested in you working with them on getting your video brand right. The little extra thing I had for you is really about our apps. Because about 80% of the content being played. Or the video content being played. Is played on mobile. And not only on mobile. But in mobile apps. And so far apps and video apps has only been for the few. The ones you are familiar with here. Amazon. Netflix. And YouTube. That could afford to do it. But this year at the 23 Summit in August. We launched an all new 23 video app framework. Massively enabling every organization to be able to do video apps. So start thinking and finding your app team. That might be running your company's app. Or perhaps there's a potential to do an all new app. With all your content. Perhaps for everyone. Perhaps for a closed audience. Where they can automatically do it. Or maybe they can automatically be updated with your content. You can easily design it the way you want it. Webinars. Video. All the different components. You can make it into a standalone app. An all new app. Or you can put it in as a section to an existing app. Something we're seeing a lot of movement on. Sort of reinventing the banking app. The travel app. All the things where actually having your video content in there. And your webinars. Is a massive drive of engagement. But also be engagement based when you're in there. So those were five ways of starting to see. That perhaps video is not only about video. Video is actually the core element just now driving change in digital overall. And it represents an opportunity. But also a challenge for people that are driving video in organizations. And it's also an example of how pervasive video already is. That it's touching all these elements. So really think a little bit outside the safe little territory of video. And start looking at your other teams. And getting them interested in your video journey. I wanted to finish off a little bit on sort of the core role of video. And how we can close the gap on maturing. How we look at video. And how we work with video in organizations. This year, 23, we put together an all new video accelerator team. That is all about really driving change with video. It's a separate team that only builds method and tools for customers. And for the market. And we open source them to make it really accessible. And drive change. So the first thing we launched this year was all about strategy. And if you've been in digital or been in the world a little bit. You know that strategy is something we put together when things change. Sometimes it's our company strategy. We do that continuously. But also when we have new changes or challenges in the world. Digital strategy. Social media strategy. Digital transformation. Content strategy. Employee advocacy strategy. AI strategy. Gen AI strategy. There's a lot of strategies out there. When the world changes, we do a strategy. But the paradoxical thing is that to this point. Very few. Very few organizations actually have a video strategy. So this year we launched a video strategy framework. To make it really easy for you to get a strategy in place in your organization. And in a lot of organizations there's a lot of people working on video. There's a lot of money spent in a large corporate. Or a scale up. Or a growth company. Or a brand. On video. And distributing the video. And the cost of the people working on video. So it's really time to ask anyone. Do you have a video? So far we've really found very few that actually had it. Some of them. Some people had a little bit of an idea. And a few slides. But nobody really had a coherent plan. So really think about how you can get a video strategy into your overall marketing strategy. And how you work in the organization. The video ambition. The video formats. The video platform. The video organization. The video budget. And the video metrics. So you really set off for defining the journey you're on. The second thing I wanted to highlight is the video budget. So we really in video always had the challenge that we don't really know what the video budget actually is. And when you can't measure it. You can't really make decisions. You can't improve. And you can't change anything if you don't have the framework to do it. Normally in a marketing setup you're spending about 25% on marketing technology. The tools like 23. You're spending 25% on paid. On advertising. 25% on your team. And 25% on agencies and services. So it's really important to be able to understand how much are we actually spending on webinars and video. If I'm doing 500 webinars a year. I'm probably spending at least 20 hours of the time of the people that appear in the webinars. So that's a thousand hours. That's almost a person a year. I also have two people on my team. So now we're up to three people. I'm also buying gears and tools. And I have service providers. I'm also doing paid promotion of the content I do. So actually perhaps my video budget is really half a million euro or a million euro. It's time to really start putting numbers on it. Sometimes it'll be scary because you'll discover how much you're actually spending. Sometimes it'll be great because you can also show that video is actually driving a major part of the engagement. But actually video budget is a very small part of the overall marketing budget. Or overall budget in your company. So really getting to know how to do video budgets is really important. We put a tool on our website. I encourage you to check out where you can put it on and try to calculate your video and webinar budget very easily. And obviously you can go a lot deeper than what you can do in a quick tool and 30 seconds on a website. So I encourage you to start going on that journey. The other thing I really wanted to talk about is the video organization. Because in a lot of places video is still sort of scattered around. One of the gaps in video again that it's so pervasive. We see a lot of customers that have 20, 30, 50 video people. Perhaps some of them even have 200 as large as we've seen. But they're all alone working in different teams in the organization. And there is no drive on. There's no video strategy. There is no plan. There's no video plan. There is no video budget. There is no change that we are trying to achieve with this. And all the synergy of actually working and learning from each other. So really start thinking about your video organization. We've seen the video people. Being these new people. new generation of change makers, the video marketer, the video producer, the webinar program manager. But I encourage you to also really start thinking of perhaps there is even a head of video or chief video officer, at least for a few years to drive the change in your organization. Because if nobody is leading it, it's not really happening. Or at least it's only happening bottom up, sort of grassroots style, which we think great things can begin, but it's not really ever going to become what it fully could be. And even there might be a lot of money to save or money to bring more value out of what you're currently spending by really having a career current framework for it. Lastly, I wanted to end on a webinar framework. Because at 23, we get the blessing of really seeing what thousands of teams across the world are doing with webinars. So we're constantly looking at trying to cross pollinate and inspire people from what others are doing. So I encourage you to check out how you can run ad hoc webinars, recurring webinars, episodic webinars, product webinars, channel webinars, relational webinars, collaborative webinars with your partners, customer webinars, and exclusive webinars. Because we still definitely see a lot of customers that are really good at doing webinars, but they might only be doing it in one or two of these categories and not fully across the organization. Because it's tough for us to when a term like webinar, is so big that it touches all the touch points and all the channels in our organizations. So that was a few tips on really working with video. Overall, my message and my hope for the for the next year for all of you is that there's so much change and energy happening in video just now. I really feel that video is rising to not only tackle maturing video to the level it should already be at, but also to start tackling the overall change in video. And I think that's really then we can really start to see the overall challenges of digital, how we make our touch points both be human and be digital at the same time, how we start getting that balance right, how we make our websites interesting again, so people actually want to spend time on them instead of only on social platforms, how we look at all our customer touchpoints across the organization, how we get our branding teams. So my message and my hope for you is that you will potential for anyone that wants to create change and lead your organization to a better place of driving all this change that you can do currently with video. To finish off, I wanted to end on an invitation. This year, we gathered 900 people for two days from all across the world, more than 30 countries. And I'm happy to announce that the we'll be doing it again in 2026, May 28 29. First Thursday and Friday we are bringing more than 1,000 people together in the beautiful Jean Nouvel building of the Danish Broadcast Union, so the home of video, to really drive the field forward, learn from each other, find the others. The theme and the challenge to all of you is Video People Unite. It's time for video people to unite and come together, and that's what we're going to do. It was an incredible time last time around. We got so many raving statements about it. You can find some of them on the web for the experience that this is. So if video is really not just about video, but there are so many things we can move on video and video is even the next chapter in digital and tackling, fixing a lot of the challenges we have in digital just now. Perhaps actually coming together for two days and learning together is the most important thing we can do. So with that, I'm happy to invite you all to this year's 23 Summit. And perhaps Emilia's gift has something to do with that or not. We'll see. So thank you to all of you for joining, and I hope you'll create a lot of change with video in 2026. Thank you. I think we have time for a few questions. So let's try to get some questions. Try to take it away on that. We have a question from Emho who says, how do you measure success beyond views and likes? That's a great question. The most important thing in video in general as a counterpoint to sort of vanity metrics of clicks and likes is really the time-based engagement. Because that's the sort of foundational aspect of video and webinars that companies, users on average join 41 minutes on a webinar, which is an incredible time when you look at people often visiting your website for 90 seconds or two minutes. So I can really encourage you to be having the tooling and the methods in place to do what is called video attribution. So you really know the overall brand engagement and all the time being spent and who the people are. You can even start doing sort of segment analysis of who's playing a lot of video and who's playing a lot of webinars and how the engagement and the behavior is different on those customer segments. So really think about time overall for how you measure and track success. Then we have Marco who asks, how can I best convince the leadership team to spend more money on video? Great question, because that's really what you want to be doing in a lot of circumstances. I think really think about how you can measure the engagement in correlation to the overall brand engagement in the company. For example, you want to know, is it 50%? Is it 30%? And what is the video budget part of the overall budget? That's sort of the more business case, the hard number side of it. I think one tip would also be that for a lot of leaders nowadays, video is really the most fundamental to their leadership. We're seeing a lot of video producers and webinar program managers being really closely connected with the senior, senior management of the company because they're the ones miking them up. They are the ones coaching them to be on camera. They are the ones driving them on how to tell great stories on camera, be comfortable. They are literally touching the people, not only metaphorically, but also in the real world. So I think for a lot of video people. Yeah. Closing that gap that you actually have unlimited access to the very senior management is something we're seeing a lot of just now where the senior management really understands and sees the value of video. And we're even starting to see a lot of board and C-level focus on video. We recently heard about a company that has spent one and a half hours of a board meeting to understand how video was changing their business. This is a large financial institution. So incredible to see. So really think about what is it in your context that are the iconic numbers and build that business case with some of the elements I've been through in this presentation and a lot of the elements you can also easily access on the 23 website, all the tools to drive numbers. But as a video person, we need to become good at numbers and driving stories and change with these elements to really do it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, then we have one more question, which ones are we taking? Are we scrolling a little bit up or scrolling down? Which one should we have? Let's take one from Em, which is how do you decide which video formats to prioritize brand product case social webinar? Great question. And a real challenging one, right? you only got the time you got. I would always encourage you to try to do as wide a set of production as possible to be working with your whole organization on video, on all the market facing elements. How are you enabling your sales team? How are you enabling your partner team? How are you enabling your comms team? How are you working across all the things that a company does and marketing? Because we see a tendency for video people to start being really good at one thing and then they have a success. That's great. And then they do a lot more of that. But then 90% of the organization is saying, oh, video, that's something we use for product launches where we do a product video and perhaps a webinar. No, no, we can't use video and webinars for anything than that. So really think about how you drive that change and how you really work across broadly and then start doubling on the successes. Then it most likely will also be easier to get budget when you actually hit a home run on something you're doing that is starting to drive a lot of engagement. Webinars would be a great example of this where we definitely see a tendency to, as I said earlier, to work in one category or work in one type of webinars and not really broadly, right? Webinars, yes, is a broadcast medium, but it can also be a recurring thing on your website to create engagement that every week there's a webinar to learn about your company. That somebody does from your team. It can also be a relational thing that you get 500 salespeople and account managers to run the same webinar or advisors in your organization when you're doing a product launch. First, you do the main webinar, then you do the 500 webinars individually, obviously with much smaller audiences, but a different type and a different level of relationship and intimacy. So definitely go broad to begin with and even paint the picture also to your team that we can't be doing all of it, even if you're only doing half. Show all the things we're not doing because we currently don't have enough resources on the team to do them. And then really think about how to train other people because that's also where you really scale, right? Do you have the right tools in place so that you as a video producer or you as a video change maker in your organization can train others to do it, right? A lot of the most basic formats of video can easily be set up in fairly fixed, studio environments or a few tripods here and there that makes you able to go in and very easily do some of the formats. And when you start knowing how to do that, then suddenly you can put a 10x or even a 50x on the amount of things you can really do in the business as opposed to being constrained, for example, to a kind of a fixed big studio model. Great. We got one last in the top here. Jacob asks, when are you looking forward to the most during video days this year? Oh, that's a great question. I can't really pick. I think we have some incredible cases on Saxo Bank coming up shortly on how to do video strategy and a lot of things we just spoke about. Tomorrow we have on audio, which is sort of the often forgotten aspect of video, which is audio. The video is all about the sound. And we also got great cases for video. For really running all your numbers and stats in the state of video tomorrow, we will disclose a lot of key numbers to be driving and understanding video more on your organization. So I can't pick, but perhaps you can. Who knows?