In this episode of Speak PR, host Jim James, a veteran PR professional with 25 years of agency experience, explains how to produce short, cost‑effective videos—especially edumercials aimed at children—using the AI‑powered platform Lumen5. He outlines the prohibitive costs of traditional agency video production, describes Lumen5’s free tier and the $19‑per‑month starter plan (including 10 videos per month, no watermark, and live‑chat support), and walks through the platform’s workflow: uploading text, a URL, or media, selecting templates, and letting the AI fetch relevant footage, GIFs, and music. Jim highlights customization options such as brand presets, logo placement, royalty‑free music, and outro creation, and shares a real‑world case study where he and his sister Shelley used Lumen5 for the “Luna & Go Lightly” series teaching kids about the impact of light on well‑being. He calculates the ROI—under $2 per video—and compares Lumen5 to alternatives like Doodly and Video Samurai, explaining why Lumen5’s pricing and quality suited his needs. The episode also mentions distribution options (MP4 download, sharing to Facebook, Vimeo, TikTok, etc.) and other applications like training videos and a Dubai Water Awards campaign. Jim concludes by promoting his Speak PR Mastermind course and encouraging listeners to try AI video tools.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR Happy 2021. My name is Jim James and this is the podcast for you if you've got value in your organization, you're just looking for some ways to share that, and I believe that technology can hold the key. There's so much great tech out there that really you can replace an agency using some of these tech-enabled platforms, and I've been running an agency for 25 years across Asia and the UK, helped over 500 clients, and run my own businesses too that are not in PR. And I know how difficult it can be and expensive it can be to commission an agency to do work for you, especially when it comes to content creation. So today I'm going to talk about creating your own videos in less than 60 seconds using a platform called Lumen5. Lumen5 is just one of a number of AI-powered platforms that help you to create content for free that you can communicate online. Now, Lumen5, that's L-U-M-E-N and then the numeral 5 dot com. I'm using that because it has a free version, so you can create 3 videos under what they call the community platform for free, 3 videos per month. It has a Lumen5 watermark. If that's a problem for you, you might want to upgrade, which is what I've done. I've upgraded to the starter group package, which is $19 per month. If it's billed yearly, you save $35, and it has a, a free trial. And in that, you get 10 videos per month, no branding, and 24/7 live chat support. Now, I've started to use this, and actually I'm also using this with my sister Shelley James, who is creating a series of videos for young people to learn about the impact of light on their well-being. She has a series called Luna and Go Lightly. So she and I, over the Christmas and New Year period, really got to grips with Lumen5, because when we went out to some production companies, we were quoted anything from $1,500 to $60,000 for these short explainer videos. And needless to say, these videos have such a short shelf life, as we've spoken about before. On YouTube, it could be less than a week. And unless you've got a massive budget that you're promoting, for example, a large product on that 30-second spot, for what we call an edumercial, those sorts of prices just don't make sense. But the video medium is what young people want to watch, and that's the problem we're trying to solve. We want to get young people, children, to watch videos about the impact of light. So they learn about the need to turn off their screens, for example, 2 hours before going to bed. So Lumen5 is an AI-powered platform, as you can imagine, and they have an enterprise version if you want to create any, you know, huge numbers. And there's a business one as well. Now let's just look at what it is that you can do. Now what happens when you log in to Lumen5. You can create social media video, you can create infomercials or edumercials. And in my experience, these are now the way to go if you're using a platform, for example, like Lumen5. This is creating content by auto-finding the right kind of images for the content that you want to create. Now I'm also using platforms including Doodly, um, for making infomercial sort of education where I'm typing in text and it's making interesting sort of almost cartoon-like videos. And that's proving to be very good for, for example, the Speak PR program. But for kids, we wanted something a bit more impactful. And also what we're finding with Doodly is it's great, it's taking quite a bit of time to create each individual video, adding music and text. So what Lumen5 does is it enables you to add your text, and then Lumen5 will go out and find for you the different videos. Now, it not only adds a video, it can also add GIFs, and you can also upload your own video or stock footage and logos as well, which is great because it means you can brand it and you can create an outro. Now, are 3 different ways to start the video. One is to upload some text, another is to include a URL, another is to add your own media, for example a podcast. So the way of sort of ingesting and starting your projects is really, really simple and quick. And what I like about it is already has some preset templates for Instagram, for Pinterest, for Facebook, for LinkedIn, and And you can resize those as you go along. So once you've entered your text, for example, just adding 6 or 7 different bullet points and choosing a template, within less than 10 seconds, Lumen5 will go out and find archive footage which is less than 10 seconds each as a clip and attribute those individual clips to your individual text pieces. So it's reading the text, understanding the text, and then bringing in the relevant videos to supplement and support that. If you want to then change the length of each individual frame as you have, you can change the number of seconds. You can change the text. You can change the location of the text. And there are also different templates for each individual scene so that you can have, for example, a title scene or a quote scene or an overlay. You can also change the text size and the location of the text on the individual screen. So it's really very, very flexible indeed. Now you can also create some brand presets, so you can, for example, add the logo or the particular style that you want. If you're creating content, for example, for a client that's got some brand guidelines, you could put those in already. So what we're finding, having bought the 120, uh, videos in the 12 months— because it's 10 per month, uh, or a total of 120— that we're already making multiple iterations of the same video in less than 10 to 15 seconds. So it's really quite remarkable Then you can also choose different royalty-free music, and this I particularly like because, as I've talked about on an earlier podcast, the way that we can brand our events is also through sonic branding. Choosing a theme tune, you can upload, for example, some audio you've already bought from a sound library, or you can use the many presets that they've got on here which match different moods, and they match the templates that you've also got. So you can enter your text, you can change if you like the pace of the program, and in individual scenes you can change the layout of the text, and you can change the music that accompanies that. And then you can create an outro, for example, with your own logo and maybe a link to the program. And then you can download that as a video file, as an MP4 file. Which then you can share to Facebook or to put up to, for example, to Vimeo and embed into your website. So Lumen5 is proving to be a very easy to use and simple but very effective platform for me and for this project we're working on called Luna. And I'm also now starting to use it for training videos. Because I can add in content, and because the images that it's calling out represent the content, it's saving me what was going to be the cost of finding illustration or going to somewhere like Unsplash and cutting and pasting all these different images. Because of course, it's the— it's not just the accumulation of all these images, it's the editing of them and then making sure that from a grading point of view, they all look and feel like they're part of the same image. And part of the same project. So Lumen5, if one pays, uh, for the, um, pricing that I've taken, which is the starter program at just $19 a month, you can create over 120 videos. So, um, really you're looking at not even $2 per video. So the ROI then on, for example, an edumercial aimed at children that might last only 30 seconds for them to watch, and maybe 5 days on YouTube, and maybe appears once or twice on Twitter, or maybe on TikTok, for example, where there's almost no commercial value because we're trying to educate children, not sell them on something. Lumen5 makes this possible. Okay, there are some other platforms around as well, like Video Samurai. I've chosen Lumen5 because the pricing works, the interface is good, and I like the quality of the content that we're getting down when we finish the project. I haven't tried the 24/7 yet on the service, but they have a chat on the, on the website, um, so I'm sure that it's, it's, it's very good indeed. You can use these content for explainer videos. I've created a video for the Dubai Water Awards, which is a client of ours where I'm helping them to get companies to enter for up to $1 million for awards for technology to solve the water crisis. So if you've got an edumercial, an infomercial, even just a straight commercial, and you can't afford the budget of one of these outsourced agencies, and you are getting a bit frustrated, we're trying to make it on something like iMovie, then check out Lumen5 because you might find that for a fraction of the cost and frankly a fraction of the time, you could be creating videos and sharing them and then getting on with the rest of your work. So thank you so much. My name is Jim James. I hope you find this podcast of use. I like to share tools and technologies that I think can change the way that we can all use content creation and distribution. And I had this in the Speak PR Mastermind. That's at speakpr.co, which is a 6-week course explaining how to storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and turn on. So do check that out if you're interested. Come over speakpr.co. You can also find more information about me on LinkedIn, and my name is just Jim James, East West Public Relations. So until we get a chance to meet again, I wish you. Happy New Year, that you're staying safe, you have a profitable business, and that if you're going to make video, check out one of these AI-related tools and let me know how you get on. Thanks so much for listening.
