This is just Mail Merge 2.0 and it feels just as gross as companies trying to pretend they send "personalized" emails when it's all automated. I half-expected this to be a story about a new approach to support/outreach but no, it's just the newer version of "Hey $firstName!".<p>It's astounding to me that the founder not only did this but then wrote a blog article bragging about it as if this was good idea. Clearly the customers thought this was real (as seen in their replies), I can't imagine most of them would feel the same way if they knew it wasn't personalized at all and was just a deepfake.<p>The bit about "I would clone myself to greet people so I could work in the back", is super cringe. I'm not even going to open that can of worms... I don't believe this is ethical at all unless there was a clear disclaimer (which it appears there was not). Lastly "the genie is out of the bottle" is a terrible justification.
This is the inevitable next level of marketing/customer service bullshitery.<p>The lack of self-awareness these people show and even brag about when they manipulate, fake and scam every single aspect and gesture where it still might exist any real connection between humans is astonishing.<p>This is yet another scorched-earth marketing tactic, it might be "good" for those doing it first ( which is what matters in this damn tech war-economy ) but the price of broken trust, cynicism and apathy that follows is something that affects the whole.
I'm a big fan of Marshall but this is just so clueless. People appreciate the video *because of the cost* that... that's the thing! This is not genuine, at. all.<p>>If I was a retail store owner greeting customers at the entrance and someone came to me and offered to place a clone to do the same job, so I could be productive in the back, would I take that offer? Yes.<p>No you wouldn't. Because a creepy clone at the entrance that is unable to reply to customers or interact with them in a genuinely dynamic way would be terrible. Which is what this is.<p>I don't like being negative but this, this just sucks. You're tricking people in believing you paid a higher cost for that video than you did and thus about the amount of fucks you give about them. Furthermore once more companies start doing this, this format will lose it value because it no longer demonstrates anything even from actual genuine people.
This seems at least a little unethical. At the very least, I would think worse of a company that sent a video to me that seemed personalized, but later turned out to be mass-produced. He has an ethics section in the article, but doesn't doesn't go very deep and (unsurprisingly) concludes that his own actions were perfectly fine.<p>The root of the problem is <i>why</i> customers respond well to these videos: they're surprised and impressed that the CEO of the company would take time out of his day to record a thank you video just for them. And the fact is: the CEO did not. It's deception, plain and simple. Not big, evil, Theranos-level deception, but deception still.<p>To put it another way, how do you think customers would respond if, along with each email, you included some text saying "this video was automatically generated"? I'd assume pretty poorly. The difference between that response and the actual response is the value of the deception here. I think that "if we were honest about this, customers wouldn't like it" is a good litmus test for whether you're doing an ethical thing or not.<p>Really, I think this is doing a sort of trust arbitrage. The tech exists to fake personal videos now, but customers aren't widely aware of it. You can take advantage of that difference with stunts like this. In a few years, people will know this can easily be done and the value of personal videos will drop. At some point it'll be no different to the average customer than an email with "Hi <name here>!" or a letter with faux-handwriting on it.
I genuinely cannot believe someone wrote this entire article about how efficiently they lied to 10,000 people without having a single second of self awareness. The only thing I can think of is that Windsor is paying them for promotion, but of course that still doesn't explain it.<p>"Is this genuine? Of course, it's just as genuine as if I had a clone replace me in all personal interactions so I could get on with stuff I actually care about." How is this not a parody?<p>Edit: From another comment, he's an investor (<a href="https://angel.co/company/windsor-2/funding" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/company/windsor-2/funding</a>). Must have slipped his mind when he was writing the "Ethics" section.
I saw another startup doing this few days before and from the looks of it I'm guessing many more are coming.<p>I'm guessing soon it will be like the automatic emails which address you like "Hello {{first}} {{last}}!" and anytime I see anyone using my name in subject line it generally has quite the opposite effect on me.<p>I'm guessing same is gonna happen to videos. As the saying goes, fool me once...
Similarly there is a phenomenal company called HandWrytten. It uses robots to write thank you cards with ink pens. I upload a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, with a message for each, and the robot beautifully writes out the card in my own handwriting; personal hand writing is an extra fee. Takes about an hour for 155 contacts.<p>I keep up with hundreds of people in my job and something personal like this really goes a long way.<p><a href="https://www.handwrytten.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.handwrytten.com/</a>
This post might have been less profoundly slimy had it not proudly reeled off emails from customers who actually <i>did</i> take time out of their day to write their replies, thinking that some form of person-to-person communication had already been established.<p>Look at all these suckers who took the bait! Just think what automatic catfishing could do for <i>your</i> business!<p>Now, if only you could automate the second layer and keep that Awesome Customer Engagement going, all without the pesky time sink of human involvement. Just do a sentiment analysis on the email the customer sent and send them the appropriate response video -- either "Wow Andrew, thanks so much for your reply Andrew! It's always great to hear from our favorite customers like you Andrew!" or "Andrew, I'm so sorry to hear that you aren't completely satisfied. Andrew, I'm putting you directly in touch with Jen, who leads our Andrew Satisfaction department. Just give her a call at 555-123-4567 and follow the prompts to indicate whether this is about a return, a new order, or the status of an existing order."
This is an ad.<p><a href="https://angel.co/company/windsor-2/funding" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/company/windsor-2/funding</a><p>There's zero reason to believe any of the data is true.
I sent paper Christmas cards to people who registered an account on my link aggregator platform. The website is free to use. I wrote about 50 cards by hand. The addresses were provided by the users as a response to my “who wants a Christmas card from me” post.<p>What this guy did is appalling…
I just got a similar video from my car salesman a couple weeks back, and wondered if it was truly personalized. I just went back and watched it, and I think it is, because his lips are clearly saying my name. Not like the sample video on this post, where it's obvious he's not saying "Andrew" if you look closely. Even still, now I wonder if maybe it was just a better version of this technology.
And... now it's ruined for everyone. When someone does bother to sit down and write a personal email or compose a personal video or record a personal audio greeting, it will be difficult to distinguish it from the faked kind. Fake sincerity has taken over from reality, and now we're left worse off than before.
Personal and social bounds on the ethics of sincerity are interesting to explore.<p>Does a deep-faked video thank-you from the CEO feel more or less sincere than other long-established gestures?<p>1. Flowers organised by assistants with a card signed “by the CEO” without their knowledge or involvement. (“Thank you for the flowers!” “The flowers? Oh, yes. The flowers.”)<p>2. An assistant PMing everyone individually on a company Slack channel from the CEO's account to say how _deeply valued_ they are as a SincereApp employee.<p>3. Thank-yous ghost-written by professional writers bearing another's signature. (Freelance letter writing exists already, although not to the extent that it's portrayed in _Her_ where lovers, family members and professional colleagues hire Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly to write their personal correspondence and love notes for 20 years straight.)<p>4. Professional actors or celebrities congratulating strangers they don't know. (Already exists at <a href="https://www.cameo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cameo.com/</a>.)<p>5. Handwritten notes from company employees thanking you for your belief in their company, when handwriting a note is a to-do on a packing and shipping checklist.<p>6. Mailmerged printed marketing proclaiming, “You're our favourite customer, [name]!”<p>All of these feign sincerity to some degree.<p>The difference with the deepfaked video thankery linked here is that it's not well-known to be fake yet.<p>There will be an initial period where people are impressed by it (they sent flowers!), then disappointed, betrayed, and tricked to learn that the gesture was automated.
So this is basically an ad for <a href="https://www.windsor.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.windsor.io/</a>, I guess. Wonder what sort of deal they worked out?<p>Shame it leaves such a sense of disgust in most people here, to judge by the comments so far. They may have picked the wrong crowd.
> <i>During our 60 day experiment, inside that window of time we had a split of customers that received a video, and those that didn't.</i><p>>* - Of those that didn't receive a personalized video from me, only 3.75% purchased from us again in those 60 days.*<p>>* - Of those that received a personalized video from me, 7.02% purchased from us again in those 60 days.*<p>On one hand this is in my opinion a bit narrow-minded/short-term. Let's see what happens once people understand that the video wasn't personal (that they were tricked to think that it was?) + once a few more companies start doing the same thing.<p>On the other hand, I can believe that having videos which mention your name (let's be a visionary: let's imagine that e.g. Facebook's user profiles or similar stuff can be used, therefore that even some funny/happy comments can be added to the video mentioning e.g. some of your favourite things like stuff you like to eat/read/do or your favourite color etc...) can be somehow more entertaining or at least more "engaging" (as it's currently one of the most favourite buzzwords used in the Internet) compared to plain old-style videos.<p>But: that reminds me of the few times when I was sitting in a room (or I was in a conference call) and there was another person that had the same name as mine => each-single-time that that person's name was mentioned (same as mine) I got stressed (suddenly having to pay attention) and after 1-2 hours I was tired even if I actually didn't have to interact at all => I can think that such strategy, involving ~personalized videos, might have the same effect, meaning that people can only focus on few things that try to get their attention before starting to feel tired.<p>BTW.: I noticed just now, for the first time since years, that the comments-window can be resized :P I now do feel quite stupid, but I still feel like celebrating, hehe. Until today I wrote all my comments in the window having its default size, which is quite tiny... :D
This would not be horribly hard to do without the deep fake stuff. 1000 names covers ~72% of the population. Change the video a bit so you have a cut just after the name (One that looks like it fits and you could record just the hello name part and have the other 90% be the same.<p>Then you send the 237 Mikes the same video but now it is not a deepfake.
Once a week or month you sit down and record any new names for half an hour or so.<p>Longer time sure but not 10k videos long like he implies.
One day we'll be opening “personal messages” from CEOs and feeling no more special or warm inside than we do from the “happy birthday!” phpBB emails we get from long-forgotten forums on the day we pretended was our birthday for security reasons.<p>And, let's be real, that day is probably tomorrow now that we all know the SaaS [Sincerity As A Service] industry 2.0 exists.
On the one hand, as a work of technology this is pretty neat, and I'm having fun with the fact that this even happened at all in a "wow the future really is now" sort of way, but holy lord who lives in heaven, HOW did this happen without anyone telling him off for this obviously horrible idea.
This seems similar to Tavus, as discussed (70+ comments) just over a week ago in <i>Launch HN: Tavus (YC S21) – AI-generated personalized videos for sales outreach</i>:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037322" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037322</a>
The videos were generated using Windsor a YC startup [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/windsor" rel="nofollow">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/windsor</a>
This is soon going to become mass market technology and people will know it's automated and will just disregard it like any other message / email that has your name trying to make it personal.
The idea of a video mail merge is interesting. Not sure I have time to review thank you videos from all of my vendors. The video time crunch cuts both ways whether its making videos or watching them.
The developer of oh-my-zsh did something like this when a coworker bought me one of their branded mugs. It's very odd to get as a customer. Not bad, just not expected.
I think this is no different than a photocopied signature from the CEO in a personalized letter. We have a Microsoft Certified Partner plaque with a Bill Gates signature that is a reproduction. I'm not losing sleep over it.