Standing Out in the Era of AI: How Marketers Can Win with Video with Lisa Vecchio, VEED

Lisa Vecchio joined VEED as the channel that helped build the business started to lose its certainty. VEED had grown through organic demand, building tools around searches like video compressor and automatic subtitles, but AI search and social-first discovery mean the company now has to create more of its own demand.

That shift has changed the operating rhythm of the marketing team. Paid search budget is moving into brand, social, creators and influencers, while the team tracks signals like reach, frequency, branded search and revenue rather than pretending every touchpoint can be neatly attributed.

Lisa brings a global lens to that work, with 20 years across edtech, travel, Hootsuite, Aircall and now AI video at VEED. Her argument is practical: marketers need to get hands-on with new tools, make space to experiment, and stop waiting for permission to do less boring work.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Tom: You have worked across the US, Australia and the UK. What did moving markets teach you that a single-region career might not?

Lisa: I have been in marketing for 20 years, and I am one of those people who actually built my career out of passion and purpose. From a young age I was culturally curious about how marketing could help businesses, bring people together, influence and build networks.

I spent nine years at one company in edtech in the US, then moved to Australia because I always knew I wanted to work in international markets. I came to the UK 10 years ago, worked for early startups getting to their first million, then went in the opposite direction to Expedia for its B2B enterprise business. In the last five years I have been in mid-scale companies like Hootsuite, Aircall and now VEED.

Working across markets teaches you that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You need to think about more than localisation. You have to think about cultural relevance, market maturity, different competitors and how to adapt your strategy.

The formative part was early in my career at Wiley. Because I was curious about travel and cultures, I put myself in a position to work with international markets. I did the late-night calls, led sessions at global sales meetings, and built relationships with those teams. So when I said I wanted to move abroad, it was natural for them to move someone from the US HQ to Australia.

That became part of my brand as a marketer. I became the international person, which made me attractive to global companies. The advice I would give is to make space outside your current job scope. Build relationships with people already in the roles you want, volunteer for extra projects, and do not wait for the opportunity to fall in your lap.

Tom: Marketers are caught between FOMO and imposter syndrome around AI. What should they do instead of freezing?

Lisa: I constantly feel like I either have FOMO, because I am not moving quickly enough, or imposter syndrome, because I do not know if I can do it. I think that is a healthy way to think about this moment. If your sentiment is, “I will ignore AI and pretend it will go away”, you are not future-proofing your career.

For people early in their careers, it would be a real disadvantage not to become AI native at the start of this journey. There is accountability on the individual, on leaders and on the organisation.

The individual has to be curious, ask questions and start experimenting. That might mean joining communities with other marketers, using LinkedIn, or taking advantage of the free courses that are everywhere. They just need to get started.

As a leader, I have to think about how we use AI to improve efficiency and productivity, but also how I create a safe space for the team to experiment. Agents are a big topic right now, so how do we get people hands-on with those tools?

We are hosting a marketing hackathon because I think that is part of my responsibility. I want to bring marketers together to play, have fun and learn about tools like OpenAI, n8n and Lovable, and about vibe coding for the job they are trying to do. In this case, that job is creating content for social.

Tom: VEED grew through organic demand. Why did the brand strategy need to change?

Lisa: The game changed. Traditional search is in decline, LLMs are changing how people discover things, and VEED grew on organic demand. We had the privilege of being a great case study for SEO.

We built our product around existing demand. People were searching for a video compressor tool, automatic subtitles and specific video features. We built those things, and people came.

We cannot expect that demand to keep knocking on our door. We have to create new demand, which means more top-of-funnel awareness. That is where brand becomes more important.

A lot of marketers understand the frustration of trying to convince a CEO to invest in brand or not overemphasise an attribution model we all know is flawed. You start with data. You talk about the 95:5 rule and the reasons growth is not moving as quickly as before, then you build buy-in.

One of our first big tests was our first trade show as we started moving into the enterprise space. Someone on the team suggested a bare-bones stand to test the channel, but that was not true to our brand identity. VEED is bold, and risk-taking is part of our DNA. So we went big with a bright green booth and a digital avatar booth.

The CEO was there and saw people saying, “That is so cool, what is happening in there?” Those meaningful conversations made him say we should do it again and think about what else could compound from it.

We also ran a brand campaign in New York with out-of-home and social. We used real creators, put their faces on billboards, brought them to New York, and had them hunt through the subway system to find their billboard. They naturally shared it on social, and people who knew them shared it too. It gave us visibility in a market where we did not already have a lot.

Now branded search is a leading indicator for growth, and we can correlate that to revenue growth. We are not removing attribution entirely, but the CEO is saying we should focus more on reach and frequency. We are in the AI space, shipping a feature every week, if not every day. We do not have the luxury of taking three or six months to build a campaign plan.

Tom: If attribution cannot explain every brand interaction, which signals tell you the shift is working?

Lisa: The attribution model still exists, especially when we are planning for 2026. We are looking at all the data points. But when you are operating in a world where you are not dropping links because that limits reach, and where creators are making content on your behalf, it will not show up the way paid search did.

We use an MMM model, and that is directionally telling us that organic channels and influencer channels are more cost-effective than traditional paid search. That helps us test a shift in budget.

We are also looking at the relationship between impressions from search, the influencers we are working with, branded search lift and revenue. There is regression modelling happening around that.

The channel strategy has changed. We shifted budget, changed the channels we are targeting, and made social-first work a core part of the plan. The content we create has completely changed too.

On X and LinkedIn, previous posts might have had a couple of hundred impressions, maybe a thousand or two. Now some posts are getting 100,000 or 200,000 impressions. That tells us the formula is working. Traffic to the website is increasing significantly.

When we split brand and non-brand, the non-brand traffic is still mainly driven by search and our work to show up in LLMs. The brand lift is coming from the social-first and influencer approach. Then we have tested paid social on top of that, which has been more cost-effective from a CAC perspective. We isolate, add to the mix, and keep learning from the data.

Influencer has also changed. Previously it was mostly influencers creating their own content from a brief and amplifying it. Now it is more blended. They interact with our branded content and our own brand channels. On X, that might be commenting and resharing. On Instagram and TikTok, we give them more creative freedom because that is where they shine.

Our CRM channel, meaning email and lifecycle, is still a top-performing channel for us. As we mature our database and first-party data, I am not overlooking that at all.

Tom: Where should B2B marketers start with AI video before they try to generate everything from scratch?

Lisa: I think AI affects video in two ways. One is AI creation, where you generate content. The other is AI editing, and those do not have to sit in isolation.

You may already be producing content for social. The opportunity is to equip people who are not social editors or video specialists to create more content. They might record a talking head video for LinkedIn about an event, or a thought leadership point, and use simple tools to make it polished.

I am a marketing generalist. I am not a designer, and you do not want to see my PowerPoint slides. But I am publishing more video than before because I can do it in 20 minutes in my living room without needing help from my team.

Simple things matter. Automatically adding subtitles, having a brand kit ready so you can add your logo and colours, and using edit with script so the tool removes ums, ahs and silences from the transcript. That can take a rough video and make it shareable.

For generated video, there is a lot of noise and a lot of caution around AI slop. We still have to balance the human and the AI. But there are useful cases already.

Video ads are one. You can generate different ad variations, change the colour, character or headline, and get quick feedback on whether the message works before spending more on production. Then you might hire an agency to produce the final version.

Avatars and talking heads are another. They have been used in training, development and internal comms. We launched our own model, Fabric, where you can upload an image and make it talk. People have told us they are using it for CEO internal comms by uploading a photo of the CEO and a voice clip. It can be hard to get the CEO to record the campaign message or LinkedIn post, so teams are experimenting with that.

We are also using it for themed campaigns around moments like Halloween and Black Friday. We are testing AI influencers for Instagram because we do not currently have a social creator for that channel. The point is to test whether they can explain something and then be paired with motion graphics to create social-first content.

Tom: Which video formats actually fit B2B marketing rather than feeling like a novelty?

Lisa: A practical one is B-roll. If you are creating a talking head video, you need context around what you are saying. A two-minute video of only your face can get boring.

You can feed a script into the tool and generate images or context to support it. If you say you were at an event in London, the background could change to the London Eye. If you are talking about revenue, maybe a chart moves up the screen. It sounds basic, but it gives B2B marketers a way to make talking head content more engaging.

Another use case is training and demos. If you have a longer demo, you can use a generated talking head for the first five or ten seconds as the intro: “Hey, I am Tom, and I am here to show you how to use this tool.” Because you can edit the transcript and regenerate a word, you can reuse the same demo and change the intro without recording everything again.

There is also a broader point about B2B not needing to be boring. I have been in B2B my whole career, and I think we need to take more risks. Some industries cannot take as many risks, but we are all humans. Not every piece of content needs to live up to the stereotype.

If you want to test that, use data and examples from other B2B brands to get permission. Say, “Trust me on this. If it works, great. If it does not, we will not do it again.” No one is going to die. If we never test, we stay in the land of beige forever.

Tom: How do you set up a team to use AI video without turning every asset into a committee debate?

Lisa: It depends on your organisation and what resources you already have. If you are a founder, you might be a one-person band and need to do all of it yourself. In smaller teams, it might sit with content, social or a video editor. In bigger teams, there may still be deep video expertise.

With VEED specifically, the platform is meant to be accessible to everyone. If you are using something like Adobe Premiere Pro, you probably need a video editor. The point with VEED is that it should let anyone become a video editor.

That changes how teams can work. You can equip the social media manager, the sales team or the customer success team. Think about employee advocacy. If AI handles parts of the editing, you do not need to be an editing expert.

You can record a video on the street and remove the background noise. If you were reading from a teleprompter and your eyes are not focused on the camera, you can correct that. You can add subtitles with one click. In larger organisations, templates, brand kits and locked assets help people create content without going off-brand.

A lot of people do not create video because they are afraid it is not good enough or will not pass quality control. There is also the cringe factor. People do not like hearing themselves or watching themselves back. AI editing makes it harder for the output not to be good enough if the tools are intuitive.

The practical advice is to press record and go. If you have never used a video editor, a timeline can be intimidating. Editing from a transcript is different. You search for the word or section you want to remove, delete it, and that chunk disappears from the video.

On collaboration, input is valuable, but too many opinions can make work bland. This morning, I gave my team subjective feedback on an image and basically said I wanted it to pop more. Someone on the team told me that unless something objectively was not going to work, they should just make the call. My response was, “I trust you. Pick whichever one you think will perform best.” If ten more people had been in that Slack thread, we would still be talking about it.

Tom: Which tools, bets and career lessons are shaping how you think about the next stage?

Lisa: Outside VEED, the AI tool I am looking at is n8n, because I am thinking about workflows. My job as a marketing leader is to help the team build more productive workflows and test agents, whether that is to accelerate pipeline or look at intent signals. There are so many tools you can connect, and marketers are only scratching the surface because we are not used to owning that part.

If I had an unlimited budget for one big brand moment, I would love to take VEED to Cannes Lions. The Festival of Creativity is becoming more B2B, LinkedIn has been there for the last two years, and it is becoming more creator-led. For a creative brand that values risk-taking, being part of that experience would feel like a big milestone.

The trait that has helped me most is setting an intention and going after it. I knew I wanted an international career, so I created moments for myself. I put my hand up, was brave in those situations, and built a career around what I am good at and what I enjoy.

My biggest mistake was taking the title and the money instead of listening to my gut. It happened around the time COVID hit. I forced myself out of a secure job with a supportive boss, where I felt valued and was doing work I enjoyed, because someone dangled a carrot. I will not chase title or money again over what gives me joy.

For a recommendation, I would point people to Jane Serra’s podcast, Women in B2B Marketing. She does a great job giving women B2B leaders a platform. I want to see more women showing up on camera, joining podcasts and speaking on LinkedIn, because our voices are not embedded enough in the ecosystem.