We all won it because we were powering the second iteration of the World Wide Web, Web 2.0, through uploading our own short, ten-minute or fewer films to YouTube.

As the cost per gigabyte of storage decreased and media compression algorithms advanced, every social network allowed uploads of video content in some form. It’s even supplanted images as the dominant medium on the platform, accounting for 85 per cent of all traffic.

When it comes to advertising and marketing, 72 per cent said they would rather learn about a product or service through video, and 91 per cent of businesses use video in some form.

Here comes the slop and the copycats. The “tip-blabbing talking head” (usually sat in one’s office or car) has become a ubiquitous genre of self-promotion, especially on LinkedIn.

There is still a way to stand out; through using animation.

The state of animated video for business

According to Wyzowl, 99 per cent of surveyed video marketers say that video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.

Sam Duncan, Lead Creative Producer at The Animation Co., said that brands and businesses gain a huge advantage showing their product or service instead of merely talking about it. It conveys complex ideas and messages in simple to understand forms.

“That’s the beauty of animation, whether it’s a three-dimensional, photo-realistic representation of your product doing what you say it does or even a 2D vector or motion graphic that’s quite basic looking but demonstrates the key aspects of your service, it’s far more striking than just putting a camera in front of yourself and talking about it,” he says.

Mindstamp says that viewers retain 95 per cent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared with just 10 per cent in text.

Video also carries ancillary SEO and branding benefits; well-crafted CTAs placed strategically within videos can boost website traffic and conversions.

Should you DIY animation?

Businesses can create simple motion graphics and 2D animations with software they might already use, such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Canva.

“There’s some great free tools you can use to give your text or photos some life, really handy for simple online ads or calls to action,” Sam said. “Of course, this takes time away from what you usually do. But like anything in business, you get the best results by bringing in the professionals.”

Wyzowl also noted that 51 per cent of marketers used AI to create or edit video content in 2025, down from 74 per cent the previous year. This may be part of the backlash against “AI slop” or low-quality Generative AI animations and videos permeating social media.

The Studio Ghibli creative legend Hayao Miyazaki once stated, “This [AI] is an insult to life itself” in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o recent attempts at creating images in his studio’s painstakingly crafted anime style.

“AI, at least right now, won’t replace the human element in animation or any kind of video,” said Sam. “It can augment things, it can help things along, but using robotic AI voices and plastic-looking figures with six fingers just turns people off more often than not. It comes back to the holy trinity of business, you can get something that’s cheap and fast, but you won’t get something that’s good.”

“That’s the great thing about animation,” Sam added. “It will always keep up with your business as you innovate or pivot and show off new things or angles to your offering you may not have even thought of before.”

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Nope. The phone I’m describing is the LG G7 ThinQ, which made its debut in 2018.

The LG G7 and G8 did not meet manufacturer expectations. Despite having true innovations on board, LG’s market share shrank to 2% and the South Korean electronics powerhouse withdrew from the mobile market altogether in 2021.

Can we call what LG did true innovation, even though it flopped? Is an innovation an innovation because it’s new? Useful? A combination of both?

What is an “innovation”?

According to the father of innovation diffusion research, Everett Rogers, innovations don’t really take hold unless there’s an inflection point somewhere along the line. That is, at some point, there’s a slow trickle of early adopters to an innovation, who hopefully have enough social pull and influence others into making the jump. Then, a tipping point occurs, and mass adoption follows. Sales slow as they reach saturation point and laggards finally get “the picture.”

Unfortunately for LG’s mobile division, the Artificial Intelligence “future” of Generative AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, was another half-decade away. Though we all knew that social media algorithms and certain web automations were using a form of artificial intelligence, it wasn’t “useful” until we could “speak” to it using natural language and have it answer us in kind.

AI of the kind we see today also had its failures to launch. AI researcher Dr. Emmanuel Maggiori in his incredible book Smart Until its Dumb, wrote that “we” already lived through an AI boom during the late 1950s and through to the 60s before interest waned and investment dried up in the 1980s as AI research failed to deliver anything tangible. He calls this “the AI winter”. AI has been around a long time, but it seems we’re only “now” realising its usefulness. Consider the fax machine, which was invented as an Electric Printing Telegraph in 1846. Though improving along the way, the tech finally reached mass adoption during the 1980s, Rogers’ writing “it took over 100 years for fax machines to become an overnight success.” AI – not exactly new. Possibly useful. So, what does that make it?

Innovative doesn’t mean new

An innovation, according to Rogers, must have a relative advantage to what came before, be compatible with existing values, easy to use and understand, well trialled, and delivers observable results.

So, we have to ask ourselves: how much “innovation” today is just bolting on Generative AI to something that we already have? Or, as Maggiori writes in his book, is it completely made up for the sake of appearing innovative? It seems as if some “innovators” took the advice Homer Simpson gave his half-brother Herb: “take an existing product and put a clock in it or something” instead of developing his truly innovative baby-to-English translator machine. Some companies are riding AI hype to inspire massive growth whether they produce anything practical or not. Some see it as a “remix” of the dot com bubble of the early 2000s.

When it comes to observable results demonstrating a relative advantage, Generative AI does seem to be improving performance in certain tasks, such as speeding up predictive analytics and coding. Though AI seemed to catch on like wildfire in 2023, businesses in 2024 are taking a step back and asking how AI can enhance business outcomes and where the value in AI truly comes from.

In sum, business needs to step back, think strategically, and figure out if the “innovation” being touted will improve anything. We can make the future a bit clearer by looking at “innovations” dead on and asking whether they’re able to – or will – return more than what we invest in them.

The post What LG’s 2018 AI phone failure can teach start-ups about innovation appeared first on Inside Small Business.