• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 13, 2024

My Ring doorbell in Wyoming has captured some amazing live wildlife images. Each time the Ring detects motion it sends a signal to my phone. Most recently, a red fox scurried across my front porch.

I don’t pay for Ring’s service that backs up those images because I have a full-security service that is similar, or I would have shared the video clip with you.

Lots of people share their video clips with others, according to Mimi Swain, chief commercial officer at Ring, an Amazon company. She calls these shareable clips user-generated content.

“We learned from TikTok that real and raw works,” she said.

Swain delivered the opening keynote Thursday at the MediaPost Performance Marketing Insider Summit talking about UCG videos taken from Ring doorbells, and I could completely relate to what she shared.

Ring, which does require the user to consent to storing the videos, began receiving content from its customers in 2016 about things happening at their front doors, whether kids coming home from school, tattling on a sibling or animal crossings.

The company ended up making television spots based on the images it received from customers like this one from February 2024.

“It was totally a surprise that people were willing to share these moments from their front door or around their home with us,” she said.

The most difficult part of relying heavily on USG was building that pipeline of strong content. In the early days, Ring was reliant on customers willing to share. Now the most difficult part is thinking back to a time when Ring didn’t use USG or why it shouldn’t use it.

This short-form content certainly has a role to play to augment any longer-form content, longer than a minute, it chooses to use to tell a story.

“We recently did something for Veterans Day to help keep families connected,” she said.

And I could completely understand how this would happen. Sometimes when I have no idea where my husband is on our large property and I need to speak with him but can’t get his phone to ring because of the poor cellular service, I push the Ring doorbell to get his attention and talk with him through the speaker.

Ring has been using AI to power a feature called Smart Video Search. It lets users search through recorded footage to find everything from a red fox to a brown UPS truck. The feature can find specific events in a customer’s Ring video history based on natural language searches, such as “a red fox in the afternoon.”

One of Swain’s favorite videos was a raccoon stealing packages and then it the welcome mat.

“It’s so much more effective than a product video” when trying to show how the doorbell works, she said.