Czech tech start-up Motionlab is pushing the boundaries of video personalization

Making the right impression is crucial for any company in today’s saturated online marketplace. The Brno-based company Motionlab creates personalized communication for brands and companies.

The Motionlab platform is an original solution that can generate, for example, a million different videos tailored to individual target customers in a single evening. The personalized videos can address customers by name, and take into account their purchasing and contract history.

It offers more complex personalization that some of its rivals. It can add specific details to multiple layers in each video, not just on top, and use custom fonts and advanced effects. The interaction with the customer can be tracked as well.

After its first year, the company came up with another new product, the Personalized tool, which facilitates communication between sales teams when addressing new customers. While the Motionlab platform generates high-volume videos in which data and video are mixed automatically, Personalizard enables users to easily enter and share data about a specific customer manually.

Like many tech companies, the origins of Motionlab are rather humble, starting in a student apartment in Brno, South Moravia. Due to the number of universities and the support infrastructure, the area has become a high-tech hub.

In 2015, Filip Koubek and Radek Pšurný established an animated-video company called Motionhouse, which has collaborated with, for example, Avast and Kiwi.com. Czechs became aware of the company earlier this year thanks to a #Masks4All video with the message “my mask protects you, your mask protects me,” which became a hit around the world and was mentioned in reports on CNN and the BBC, as well as in publications such as The Washington Post and The Guardian.

The two students were joined by Jan Sekerka in 2018. That same year, they launched a new company called Motionlab, which developed the platform of the same name that creates personalized videos.

Motionlab met with great success from the start, when it created videos for those interested in the Marketing Festival, one of the biggest events in that sector in the Czech Republic.

“In practice, every potential visitor received an e-mail with a video on the eve of the conference. The video addressed everyone by name and knew, for example, how many times the given visitor had attended the event in the past and which company he or she worked for,” Motionlab co-founder Filip Koubek said.

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Traffic on the company’s website and social-network pages increased almost immediately, reaching its highest level in six years. Sales also increased dramatically for the entire Marketing Festival.

“A lot of people thought we had made the video just for them, and that is exactly our goal, to establish a dialogue. Nobody likes general advertising. But wait and see what happens when it speaks to you directly,” Koubek adds.

State agency CzechInvest helped the company to realize its global business vision at the beginning by putting it in contact with specialists from the VentureOut incubator in New York. The agency partially covered the cost of airline tickets and fully secured office facilities in the center of New York.

CzechInvest representatives put Motionlab in contact with VentureOut’s experts, who advised the company on how to start doing business abroad. At the same time, the company attended events and trade fairs, where it established additional contacts.

“With CzechInvest, we were able to put our business to the test abroad without much risk and to gain know-how from local mentors and feedback from the customers that we’re targeting. It is necessary to think globally from the beginning. We wouldn’t find that out sitting at a desk in the Brno office,” Koubek said. The collaboration continued at home but with the roles reversed — Motionlab helped CzechInvest to address potential startup clients.

In April 2019, the company became the most successful startup from the Visegrád Four countries — the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary — at the Startup World Cup & Summit, and advanced to the global final in Silicon Valley.

It subsequently won several prestigious industry awards such as the Internet Effectiveness Awards and a Fénix Content Marketing prize. At the end of 2019, Motionlab also found success at the Central European tech Startups Day even in London, where it overcame competition from 20 other startups.

Today, Motionlab ranks among the leaders of the young video personalization sector. It can boast dozens of successful campaigns in various sectors and for multinational giants such as Microsoft, O2, Boehringer Ingelheim, UNIQA and KBC.