TwentyThree Summit 2025 Interview: Jonna Ekman, Marketing Director at StoryKit

Jonna, how are you doing? I'm fine, it's so fun to be here. Yes, I had a good time. People are super friendly, super curious and just, yeah, it's fun. I've had so many great discussions. StoryKit is known for enabling video storytelling at scale. Could you share a little bit more on your journey and how StoryKit is shaping the future of video marketing? Well, we started actually out 10 years ago as a publisher in social media and pretty quickly we realized that people didn't want to read text, they wanted to watch videos. And we tried a bunch of different ways to create these videos as simple as possible. We tried to educate our writing reporters to become video creators, but everything just slowed everyone down so much. So we looked for a tool and we couldn't find it, so we invented it. Actually. Amazing. Yeah, and we've been working, we've been doing this the last seven, I think, years. And now we're doing another journey, we're evolving from a tool to an automation platform. Because since the AI development that has happened and how smart all the LLMs have become, we can create video like in an instant. Since this is what almost all marketers are struggling with, we have so much that we need to communicate, not just the big things, but like the recruitment ads and the reports and everything that's sitting there that no one sees. We need to get that out there. But we don't have the time to create videos for all of that. That's what we're automating for our customers so they can do videos on everything that wouldn't become videos otherwise. Yes. So here we're talking basically about scaling, right? Yeah. What are your best tips or strategies for enabling consistent, high-quality video storytelling? I really do think that you need the right tool because if you have brand guidelines, if you have a brand book, it will probably be impossible to keep everything on brand, especially if you want to enable more production, more people, more storytelling. So you need to choose a tool where you set those brand guidelines and they stick. We have so many customers that this is really, really important for them. It can't be wrong. So that's one of the things that we're actually really good at, if I can brag a bit. Of course you can. So what would you say that for marketeers that are just starting to integrate video into their strategy, what would be your top practical advice to get started successfully and building this momentum with video? For perfect. Because you will never know what your audience wants unless you've tried and tried and tried because that's what's stopping us and that goes for everything, not just video. We are so keen on doing perfect that it just gets stuck. If you just try stuff, I mean social media is, it forgets. I mean if you put something out there that nobody liked today, well, do something different tomorrow. Where do you see video marketing evolving in this next year, especially regarding new formats, technologies, but also audience behavior and of course AI? Oh, that's a big question. I'm not saying this just because I work at StoreKit, but I truly believe that we're going to move so much more into automation. And that's not only concerning video, it's everything is going to be much more automated. And I think we haven't even scratched the surface of what's actually possible yet. So that's one of the things I think we're going to see moving forward. And everything points towards the audience just wanting more and more video. I mean, we've been talking for 7, 10 years about the trend of video. And it's not dying. I mean, all the social platforms are turning more and more towards video. If I look at how my kids behave, I mean, it's just video, it's just going to keep growing. It's interesting that you said now actually, because the theme of the 23 Summit in 2024 was video is now. It's not about a trend where video is going, how companies will be using video. No, this is reality. It's been reality for a long time. And this year's theme of the 23 Summit is the human side of digital. So I'm curious to learn what is your take on that? What does it mean to you? For me, the human side of digital is that we are going to communicate with each other much, much more in a bunch of different shapes and forms. I mean, automated, of course, live, of course, with faces, without faces, with talking, podcasts, audio. And it's a blessing and a curse sometimes because it's a busy world. But it also opens up so much more because the basis of all relationships is communication. We will be able to meet each other. We will be able to talk to each other. I mean, just look at all the possibilities that are now when it comes to translation. I mean, even live translation and video translation. That is super interesting. I mean, which is a tool that we have at TwentyThree, actually, that we just launched at Webinars6. Live translations from the webinars and yeah, from different, so many languages. So you see more communication between human beings. I mean, communication is useless if it's not aimed at towards a real person. Thank you so much. Thank you.