How Slate Uses LALAL.AI to Boost Retention & Help Sports Creators Bypass Copyright Barriers

As a small, globally distributed team, Slate understands the challenges of creating content for social media. Many available tools are overloaded with features that have little to do with actual social media content creation; something Slate set out to change by building their own brand-focused content creation platform. 

For this case study, we sat down with Shawn Roots, Vice President of Product Management at Slate to talk about their business-oriented solution and how LALAL.AI helps them increase retention and customer success. 

Slate: Focusing Only on What Matters for Social Media

Slate is a relatively new company in the design and social media content creation space. It started out as a response to a problem that the Slate founders had: they were trying to create content for social media, which was harder than it sounds like. They worked in sports and found it really difficult to make content. Even though there are a lot of tools out there, what tends to happen to them is that as soon as these tools become successful, they expand. Once they've got a foothold in social, they move beyond that.

"Slate is focused on making it easy for content creators to make content, that's it."

What makes Slate different, besides the focus on creating social media content, is that it’s completely brand-powered. In a lot of creative tools, you'll open the tool, and there are lots of stock-library assets which you can use. Branding in most products is like icing on the cake. 

And with Slate, content creation is completely powered by branding – you can't even use the product without your brand assets added into it – which brings great value for businesses creating social media content. 

Anything font, logo, graphic in Slate is put there to be used by the content creation team, which helps to create with a lot more control. That's a win-win for social media content creators, and executives. Slate just removes a lot of decision-making from creating content and makes it easier to be productive. We started as a mobile app, and it’s still our oldest and most established use case. 

About two years ago, we released a web app as well as an Android app, and they are growing and just recently, we released a product called Shortcuts. A lot of our customers have this massive and growing archive of footage that they get on sites from press conferences, and there's plenty of video content that they accumulate, but they're using very little of it because it takes too much time to watch those videos. 

Shortcuts basically watches the video for you at AI speeds. You can upload a 10 gigabyte video which is several hours long, and we automatically look at the transcripts and find the most important moments. Then, you can choose the best parts of the video and generate a clip from it, choose the size of the video, use a smart edit mode, control noise or remove background noise. And since it's built into our products, all your branding, your caption styles, any overlays or watermarking that you use are automatically put in the video that Shortcuts generates. 

Why the Sports Industry Chose Slate First

Our biggest sector of customers is the sports and live event sector. And there are a few reasons for that. The first is that our founders came from that market, and very early on, they were the first customers that piloted Slate. Another reason is that our product was initially built completely around the live events industry, which is why we've got customers in the NFL, the MLB, in American sports in general, but we've recently started growing into the UK and Europe markets as well.

Now we're getting more customers, working in marketing, who just want to be able to use a focused and easy-to-use product for social media content creation, like Reels, Shorts, or carousels for Instagram. It's a whole lot of content they can create with Slate.

By using our tool, the marketing team can act as a video team on their own. A lot of our customers have video teams which do video production work, but they've always got this chore of having to do shutdowns and social media work, which they'd rather not do.

With Slate, you free up those teams because they just load everything into the tool, set it up, and then your social media team isn't bothering you. 

How Slate Integrates LALAL.AI to Solve a Real Content Problem & Boosts Retention

In the professional, business-oriented environment where the brand is involved, customers want to do something they could never do without AI. They want to fully own and control it, unlike in the consumer market where AI gets you to click a button, and you just take or leave the output. And that’s where LALAL.AI comes in. It allows you to do something that was impossible and control the output: with LALAL.AI, you can either have only the thing you've removed, or everything else. This makes it possible for us to allow users to blend it in.

In some products, you just click a button, and it removes all silences, which we've tried to employ, but our customers wanted to have more control over the process of manipulating their content. So we wanted to have a feature implemented that feels like it doesn't work with AI but uses AI to basically do the work for you. 

"That’s where LALAL.AI comes in because it allows you to do something that was impossible."

From Personal Use to Professional Integration

I started using LALAL.AI for myself at first. I’m an avid user of samples in my hobby of making terrible beats 🙂 I was using Tracklib since it launched, but even though you can get stems there, often the best bits and pieces that you need are not necessarily available as stems. I tried so many things, including spinning up my own locally hosted tool. 

The quality of vocals is just not comparable to your product, when it comes to separation; it’s incredible. I was using LALAL.AI a lot at home, so we looked at a few options that were built specifically for our use cases, often just removing or controlling crowd noise. We have lots of sports and live events content that needs background music or noise removed because there's copyright material in it.

We tried to use a few tools built specifically for that, but they weren't that good. So we turned to LALAL.AI even though we thought it wasn’t specifically made for this, but I thought it might work.

I'm always really impressed by the results, and the team is really happy with it. There are new tools every week that drop, and a lot of companies have dropped updated versions or comparable solutions, but I think your product just remains top. 

Making Real-Time Sports & Event Content Possible

At the moment, we're in the process of adding LALAL.AI into our tool, so when any of our mobile apps needs it, it gets available through a single access point. Currently, our clients use LALAL.AI predominantly in our mobile products, because a lot of them are in the sports and live events industry, and they're creating content as it's happening. In the case of sports, that might be pre-game and post-game interviews or team talks.

Besides, our customers want to be able to put it on social media as fast as they can. So when they’re filming it, there are obviously things like crowd noise that needs to be removed or controlled.

"The main reason we integrated LALAL.AI was because we saw our customers' problem: they couldn't post content because of the copyright music playing in the background, and the industry is ruthless."

There are plenty of stories where teams get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. So in this scenario, LALAL.AI is a part of content creation. On our web products, it’s used normally for editing content after the event: there might be longer-form footage that people are cutting down and want to remove background noise from. 

LALAL.AI: A Critical Yet Invisible Assistant

In terms of general behavior, it's not a feature used by a high percentage of our customers, because our implementation is quite focused on a specific sector but the customers who do use it, use it all the time. If you look at the features with the higher usage per user, it's right up there. 

"We now have the [LALAL.AI-powered] feature, and it really keeps some of our sporting customers, as it's the go-to part of their workflow."

We know it's not something that people need to use in every single video, but when you need to use it, it's magic, and it saves your life because it's about either being able to post a video on social media or not.

That's why the people who are using it every week are using it frequently; it's not just a case of making the content better, which it does because the users can control the sound. It’s the thing that solves the problem: that content would never, ever be allowed on social media otherwise. 

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