VidLyz: An Interactive Approach to Assist Novice Entrepreneurs in Making Persuasive Campaign Videos

Videos are essential for successful crowdfunding campaigns. However, without knowledge of the underlying persuasion factors, novice entrepreneurs may find it difficult to optimize their videos for success. This paper presents VidLyz, a novel assistive tool that allows users to explore the implications of audience-engagement persuasion factors in the context of campaign videos through contrasting examples, crowd-sourced subjective ratings, and feedback on engagement factors. VidLyz promotes active thinking about the impact of audience persuasion factors in making an effective campaign video by guiding novice entrepreneurs in planning materials of their videos on their own, with consideration of the product category, the target audience, and audience-product interactions. To evaluate our system, we collected subjective ratings and feedback on persuasion factors for 140 Kickstarter campaign videos from 2100 crowd workers and presented them through our prototype VidLyz tool. A user study with 45 novice users and five previous campaign creators found that our tool was useful for understanding the implication and relative importance of the persuasion factors of the campaign videos. The interactive and active thinking elements of VidLyz promoted novice users to make coherent and persuasive pre-production plan (using storyboards) for their proposed campaign videos. A follow-up user study showed that these storyboards had a higher likelihood of getting funded by crowd workers than those with less persuasive pre-production plan. We concluded with design implications to better support novice entrepreneurs.