Motionlab develops videos that address you by name, successfully tested with clients in New York
The three founders of the Brno-based company Motionlab create personalised communication for brands and companies. CzechInvest helped the company to realise its global business vision at the beginning by putting it in contact with specialists from the VentureOut incubator in New York.
Offering customers exactly what they need is every seller’s dream, especially in the environment of the saturated online market. The Motionlab platform is an original solution that can generate, for example, a million videos tailored to the target customer in a single evening. The videos can address customers by name and take into account their purchasing and contract history.
After its first successful year, the company came up with another new product, the Personalizard 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.
Motionlab’s story began in a student apartment in Brno. In 2015, Filip Koubek and Radek Pšurný established the animated-video company Motionhouse, which has collaborated with, for example, Avast and Kiwi.com. Czechs also became aware of a video with the message “my mask protects you, your mask protects me”, which spread around the world and was mentioned in reports on CNN and the BBC, as well as in 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 eponymous platform that expands the video form with a personalisation effect.
Motionlab registered great success from the beginning, when it created videos for those interested in the Marketing Festival, one of the biggest sectoral events 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,” says Motionlab co-founder Filip Koubek.
And the result? Traffic on the company’s website and social-network pages increased almost immediately, reaching its highest level in six years, and with it the success of the entire Marketing Festival, for which sales increased dramatically. “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.
CzechInvest and Motionlab: The first steps abroad
From the very beginning in 2018, the company’s founders wanted to penetrate the foreign market. Therefore, in 2019 they participated in CzechInvest’s three-month CzechAccelerator programme in New York.
CzechInvest partially covered the cost of airline tickets and fully secured office facilities in the centre of New York. The agency’s representatives put Motionlab in contact with experts from the VentureOut incubator in New York, 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,” says Koubek. The collaboration continued at home, where for a change Motionlab helped to address CzechInvest’s potential startup clients.
In April 2019, the company became the most successful startup from the V4 countries 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 twenty other startups.
Today, Motionlab ranks among the leaders of the young video personalisation sector. It can boast dozens of successful campaigns in various sectors and for multinational giants such as Microsoft, O2, Boehringer Ingelheim, UNIQA and KBC.
CzechInvest plays a key role in the area of comprehensive support for business and investments and is a state contributory organisation subordinate to the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic. CzechInvest also accompany startups on the path to doing business. In 2019, it became the guarantor of the National Startup and Spin-off Environment pillar of the Innovation Strategy of the Czech Republic 2019-2030.
This project is implemented by CzechInvest with funding from the Marketing Program, priority axis 2 – “Development of Business and Competitiveness of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises” of the Operational Program Enterprise and Innovation for Competitiveness 2014-2020.