Blings made video personal. Selling it took nine months.

The McDonald’s marketing chief liked the video. That was the encouraging part. Getting the proof-of-concept signed took nearly nine months. For Blings, a company selling a faster way to make personalized video, the first enterprise deal moved at the speed of enterprise paperwork. The contrast is almost too tidy. Software can accelerate a message; it cannot accelerate every person who must approve it.

01 / The admirer without a budget

Yonatan Schreiber and Yosef Peterseil started Blings in 2019. Their early interviews with customer success managers exposed an awkward distinction: needing a tool and being able to buy it are different things. They shifted toward marketing. A contact supplied the McDonald’s CMO’s number; persistent outreach and a custom demonstration opened the door. The long negotiation followed. Peterseil recounted the experience on The SaaS Podcast.

The later mistakes were wonderfully ordinary. Event spending of roughly $20,000-$30,000 produced 70 leads that went cold without a follow-up system. Two attempts to hire salespeople failed to produce deals before a playbook existed. Peterseil described charging $3,000-$5,000 for pilots, then using 13-month agreements with a first-month exit to avoid negotiating pilot and commercial terms separately. These are historical sales lessons, not today’s subscription prices.

02 / The video has unfinished business

Ordinary video arrives with its decisions already made. The words, pictures and sequence are fixed in the recording. Blings’ MP5 technology carries a template’s design, animation, logic and data references. When the viewer opens the experience, their device assembles a version using the supplied customer data. Imagine a film whose props department checks your loyalty balance just before the curtain rises.

This makes a practical difference when information changes. A greeting, offer or countdown can adapt without producing a separate recording for every recipient. Buttons and branching choices sit inside the experience. MP5 is Blings’ proprietary name for video built as code; the familiar numbering should not be mistaken for a universal successor standard to MP4.

Its integration workflow will look familiar to an email marketer: copy a Smart Video link, insert CRM merge tags and place it in a campaign. The click opens the personalized experience. That distinction matters: a video linked from an email is not necessarily a movie playing inside the inbox. An SDK provides deeper embedding. The company says personalization happens on-device without storing viewers’ personally identifiable information on its servers.

03 / Give the loyalty balance a job

McDonald’s McCoins campaign supplies the clearest example. Blings describes videos that greeted members by name, matched offers to purchase history and points balances, and supplied a button directing them to the app. The point was to help people use rewards they already possessed. Personalization had a task beyond putting someone’s name on a screen.

The company-published case study reports 4.93 times as many app opens and a 4.2-fold sales increase against campaign benchmarks. It also says McDonald’s requested 11 further campaigns. These figures describe the reported campaign comparisons, not McDonald’s worldwide sales. The interesting mechanism is easy to borrow: combine a relevant entitlement with a direct route to redeem it.

Marcus Theatres applied a similar idea to birthdays, replacing a static reward email with a personalized video and a “Click to Reveal” interaction. Its published account reports five times the previous format’s click rate and 44% more conversions year over year. Those are different comparisons. The team also tested the reveal mechanic against a non-interactive version, a useful reminder that animation and interactivity are separate things to examine.

“The offer was never the issue. The experience was.”Erik Kapila / Director of Loyalty, Marcus Theatres

04 / Leave room to change the ending

VIP Nation’s monthly newsletter became a navigable experience built around fans’ preferred artists. Blings reports that the team shortened segments and adjusted menus after launch. The published click rates rose from 21% in December to 22% in January and 24% in February. The case study’s 12.3-fold ROI uses license costs as its basis; it should not be read as an audited return on every expense.

The management platform tracks scene engagement, clicks and drop-offs, supports live editing, and advertises AI testing of variants. Blings also markets text-to-video creation. Its expertise sits at the intersection of motion design, web execution and CRM operations. The product earns its place when those disciplines have to work together repeatedly.

05 / Buy the workflow you actually need

Blings sells B2B software to teams inside consumer businesses. Its current pricing page asks clients to arrange a custom quote. An investor announcement confirms a $4 million seed round in 2021, led by Hanaco with Vertex and the Berkeley University Investment Fund. Back then the technology was called MPFlyer. The name changed; the bet on code-based video remained.

Alternatives depend on the desired output. Plainly automates rendered variations from After Effects templates. Idomoo and SundaySky also compete in personalized video. A team needing conventional files for a broadcast workflow has a different problem from a loyalty team seeking a live, clickable journey. Blings belongs in the latter conversation.

The practical inference is to start with one repeatable moment: a birthday reward, an unused balance or a fan newsletter. Test a useful action against the existing message. Accurate data, a functioning destination and an attractive offer remain prerequisites. A stale database produces a stale recommendation, however elegantly it moves. The nine-month sale offers the same lesson in another form: the work around the video decides whether the video gets a chance.