Luca Gonnelli, Algo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Tools that fast-track or reduce the costs of video production have been around for many years - often based on templates that can be brought into design software or extended to cloud platforms. These kinds of tools make it possible to produce a professional-looking video spot quickly, or with a newer breed of them, produce dozens, hundreds or thousands of videos really quickly. An Italian motion design studio saw both the demands and possibilities for video automation, and launched a sister company in Turin called Algo. It has some similarities to what's out there, but takes what you might call a hybrid approach. The design process is very much like a traditional agency, with briefs and storyboards. But once that phase is completed, Algo's customers use the platform as a service. If you have an electric vehicle and have used a Volta charging station, you may have seen motion infographics on the screen that used real-time data from Bloomberg to visually show local air quality conditions on the charging totem screen. Johns Hopkins University used Algo to develop a daily COVID tracker during the pandemic. Algo's main market is the business side of social media - so more Linkedin than TikTok. But it has already done and expects to see more work coming for digital signage and Digital Out Of Home screens. Automated spots can run on screens in much the same way as digital signage platforms tap into subscription news, weather and entertainment feeds. I chatted with Luca Gonnelli, one of Algo's founders. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Luca, thank you for joining me. We've not met in person and I've never been to Torino, but maybe one time, I'll get there. Can you tell me what Algo does?  Luca Gonnelli: Sure. Hi, Dave, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So Algo is a design studio, basically, it's a creative studio specialized in data visualization and in particular in what we call video automation, which is basically software or a dashboard to create videos. Okay, and what does that mean in real terms? So if I'm a digital signage network operator, obviously we're talking about digital signage part of this, and you're doing all kinds of work for different end users, but what's that gonna mean for that person, for that end user? Luca Gonnelli: Sure. We are working on different types of campaigns and it's super interesting to talk to you about digital advertising, out-of-home, et cetera. That's normal, not often, but sometimes that's part of the equation, while, of course, the other part of the equation is social media and digital overall. So yeah, we really like to work on campaigns where we help our clients showcase data in a very meaningful way, and possibly very easy to understand for the end user, and also it's a kind of way for companies to avoid sensationalism and try to communicate to their users in a respectful and positive matter about data. But of course, it’s a way for companies to profit from their data, and use data in their day-to-day communication, which is not often very common.  In terms of the types of campaigns we work on, it's gone from completely autonomous ones like the campaign we did for John Hopkins University tracking the COVID pandemic where we were creating a video every day that was automatically tracking COVID based on the data, and this was only for online, but in some other projects Where we lean more towards the manual input of data. So sometimes we work with teams with our clients to empower them to create videos effortlessly without having to have video knowledge within the whole organization. And so yeah, in some cases, for example, in a project for Volta and Bloomberg Green, we did just that, and the output was of course on digital advertising.  Would it be fair to say this isn't necessarily what a listener might think of as a conventional video? It's not people or landscapes