Orlando Business Journal

Winter Garden AI storytelling product may change the marketing game. Here’s how.

A Winter Garden AI company last week rolled out a new product dubbed StoryShop — a video creation tool that helps users tell their story with guidance from an AI director and AI-driven edits.

While any consumer can buy a StoryShop kit for their own one-time use or to give as a gift, Orson plans to disrupt the marketing sector with its video creation tool, which can be added to existing platforms or used as a standalone piece in a marketing campaign.

A Winter Garden AI company last week rolled out a new product dubbed StoryShop — a video creation tool that helps users tell their story with guidance from an AI director and AI-driven edits.

Founder and CEO John Ehrhard is an accomplished producer of unscripted television shows like Hogan Knows Best and My Big Redneck Vacation, and has trained the StoryShop AI to reflect his expertise in creating lively, impactful reality-driven content.

Orlando Business Journal sat down with Ehrhard to unpack his latest product offering and learn how companies can use the tool to enhance and grow their businesses:

The StoryShop product you’re promoting right now is for consumers, but you have a vision for B2B. How does this early roll-out play into the future?

On the journey of getting where we’re going, we needed a way to be able to get data to train the AI. Also, StoryShop is a playground for us to try things and get feedback from end users.

Life Story gives the older generation a tool for telling their life story in a way that can be shared with generations down the line. An AI director asks the person questions designed to elicit storytelling responses. My father-in-law created a video right before he passed away; I wanted to be able to capture this so his grandkids would remember him. I actually played the videos at his celebration of life. It was powerful.

A Life Story user responds to questions to help AI build a video about her life.

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We have Love Story, too, which is for couples getting married. Just like with Life Story, the AI director asks questions, the users answer and then the application edits the video and adds music that works with the storyline. It’s meant to be really easy for the end user.

Is StoryShop complete or will you advance it further?

In the future — we’re working on this — the AI director won't ask everybody the same questions. It will ask different questions depending on the previous answers. It will learn to read emotion. That’s where the intelligence comes in. The AI also will listen to your story and create custom music to score your video. The peak of your story will have a dramatic reveal and the music will crescendo. Plus, we will give people theme options for their videos, and options for different kinds of directors. Right now, the director is an AI version of me.

How will your product work in a business context?

Marketing is changing, and user-generated content is much more prevalent. People want to have a voice in the content for a brand. Let’s use Gerber as an example. StoryShop for Gerber could be a pregnancy journey or the first week of a baby’s life. So Gerber would license a branded version of StoryShop and share it with their audience for free. Customers would create these beautifully crafted videos with music. Then, Gerber is baked into the content that people share, and it’s saved and viewed over and over again. It’s more impactful than the typical social media post.

This product could be a fit for marketing campaigns at companies like Shutterfly and Ancestry.com. Imagine StoryShop in a dating app. How amazing would it be — instead of seeing some photos and a little bio — to see a video of someone’s story. It would help you get through those initial phases of dating and not waste time.