A video interaction

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

PowerPoint has always been a divisive presentation tool. Loathed by many, it’s clung on as the default software for many organisations looking to present information internally or externally, despite its limitations. 

Technology has moved on, however, and while working with multinational conglomerate Samsung, consumer insights consultancy Netfluential upgraded its presentation style to include interactive videos. With this technology, it could share its insight in a more engaging manner and allow a range of stakeholders to access content most relevant to themselves.

Jeroen Verheggen, CEO and founder of Netfluential, admits he’s not a fan of PowerPoint. “I don’t like it very much – never have and never will. It is a poor man’s creative tool, and I can never really get across the mix of quantitative and qualitative data as I imagine it,” he explains.

While Verheggen says there are numerous data visualisation and dashboard tools, as well as ways of creating a magazine – “call it a playbook and you get extra cool points” – none are quite right. And when they do engage as intended, it’s often only for one section of a business. Just as clients often ask for everything explained in five slides, however, video invariably has to be kept short.

“Video is a great tool, but the problem you have is that not every story can be told in 1:30 min – the official videographer limit for research output, apparently,” says Verheggen. This time constraint prompted him to explore interactive videos, as they allow layers of content to be built up.

“You can use techniques such as branching [sending the viewer off in alternative directions], hotspots [allowing the viewer to click on areas of interest for a new layer of information], gaming with engaging tools such as a quiz, and chapters – allowing a story to unfold with video or audio, animation or statistical data,” he explains. “All of this allows you to fuse rich qualitative data with survey or customer data.”

Verheggen worked with WireWax, a self-serve studio platform, to create the interactive video. Basic licences start from £49 per month, but – to make full use of the software and create a bespoke look and feel – a project will be more than £4,000. An experienced video editor is also essential.



Netfluential’s research for Samsung was based on the company’s desire to move from device-focused planning to consumer experience planning and design – spanning different appliances and devices.

Lawrence Gould, senior consumer market insights (CMI) manager, Samsung, says: “With so much new information, we needed to produce engaging – yet clear and concise – deliverables, making the new knowledge travel far.”

The research resulted in a huge amount of rich qualitative data, plus a vast survey-based dataset: 200,000 variables were collected.

“Communicating this amount of data succinctly and clearly, without losing valuable richness and detail in this new area for the business, was highly challenging,” Gould adds. “The research results needed to form a source of insight and inspiration for not just product planners and engineers, but also designers, marketers and sales teams. So there was a clear need to give pinpoint access to the relevant findings for a department or function around a specific category or consumer issue.”

Samsung wanted to understand how people in several markets use services across its devices and appliances, identifying the pain points for those using categories such as music, video, news, health, photos and gaming to establish a hierarchy for innovation.

“We used several techniques, such as mobile self-ethnography, task-based user diaries, group discussions and surveys. With a load of data – including rich video content and survey data – collected and analysed, we created a hierarchy based on a ‘who needs what’ principle, to communicate the information for different stakeholder groups,” says Verheggen.

Netfluential designed an information architecture to build out the data in branches, by category, and used layers to give topline information, followed by depth. It built in hotspot areas, where the viewer could click on areas of interest to see more detail or underlying data.

“Next, we built a knowledge quiz to challenge other viewers [mainly marketers] to express what they already knew about consumers in a specific category. Subsequent video layers contained more detail around use-case situations, emotions and segment differences – all more useful to marketers. We used more than 40 hotspots per category to help viewers delve deeper into the data as needed,” Verheggen explains.

Gould says the interactive video acts as a hub of new knowledge that is accessible to teams across new product development. “Because multiple device experience (MDE) is relatively new to Samsung, it is a great tool to rapidly explain what we’re doing and get people on board. I like how we can keep refining and building content to create this interactive library of intelligence.”

Verheggen sees interactive video not only as a good tool to debrief clients and disseminate information, but also to collect data. “Survey panel and customer survey data is far from perfect. Video, in this engaging interactive form, can really help with testing ideas and concepts, or exploring a customer journey,” he says.

“If you do that at scale, and use augmented and virtual reality to help create scenarios and situations – plus natural language processing, AI and biometric technology for analysis – it becomes much better-quality data.”

And, Verheggen predicts, it’ll be mainstream within the next three to five years.

This article was first published in Issue 24 of Impact.