I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers

Does a deep-faked video thank-you from the CEO feel more or less sincere than other long-established gestures?

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.”)

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.

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.)

4. Professional actors or celebrities congratulating strangers they don't know. (Already exists at https://www.cameo.com/.)

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.

6. Mailmerged printed marketing proclaiming, “You're our favourite customer, [name]!”

All of these feign sincerity to some degree.

The difference with the deepfaked video thankery linked here is that it's not well-known to be fake yet.

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.

But video is the final frontier of digital trust. Once photos, video, and audio can no longer be trusted, what will people trust?

Digital cynicism will become total.

1. In no world would I ever believe that a cold email was significantly personalized/targeted, except if the overall content were highly specific to me. This might be wrong a good portion of the time, but it is what it is.

2. Even if I were 100% unaware of the existence of AI/ML, a video wouldn't change my mind about #1. I would be more inclined to think that they'd recorded themselves rattling off a list of customer names and then stitched that into the main video, or just rerecorded the same video hundreds or thousands of times. The latter would take some dedication, and be a pretty big waste of time, but it wouldn't convince me that the sender knows or cares more about me personally.

3. Including a video message in an email in itself is uncommon in and of itself, personalized or not. If the technique increases conversions, this alone could be a sufficient explanation. To the extent that the personalization does further increase conversions, it's equally valid to hypothesize that a novel tech demo catches their attention as it is to hypothesize that people are being deceived. Personally, I would lean toward the former.

As an aside, even in the promotional video on Windsor's home page, the videos are kind of uncanny valley. May not be a big deal if the recipient doesn't think too much of one word being slightly garbled because the remaining speech sounds natural, but I'd be concerned about it completely butchering some names (particularly longer ones).