Yosef Peterseil on Restaurant Technology Guys: why personalized video beats the loyalty email

Our co-founder and COO, Yosef Peterseil, joined Jeremy Julian on the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast (episode 359) to talk about a problem every restaurant marketer knows: guests live in a video-first world, but almost every channel a brand owns, email, SMS, and push, is still text. The conversation covers the MP5 format, interactive referral and loyalty journeys, and the real numbers behind them. Here are the highlights, with the full episode below.

The gap: video-first guests, text-first brands

Yosef’s framing is one most operators recognize instantly. Guests search for a two-minute clip instead of reading the manual, yet nobody opens a newsletter hoping for the next one, because it is text and a few images. The opportunity is to close that gap inside the channels brands already own, rather than adding a new one.

How Blings makes a million personalized videos without making a million files

The MP5 is a single HTML video template. Instead of pre-rendering a file for every customer, the video is assembled on the guest’s own device the moment they click, pulling live data at that instant. It weighs about 60 kilobytes, produces unlimited variations from one template, and because generation happens on the device, the guest data never reaches Blings. Yosef noted on the episode that the company is SOC 2 compliant.

The Habit Burger result: a 42 percent share rate

This is the case study worth writing down. Habit Burger brought Blings the idea of turning a friend referral into a video, building what Yosef describes as the world’s first video referral program. A guest receives a video telling them they have won a free burger, and one click redeems it through an API call. They can then type a friend’s name directly into the video and share it, and the friend receives a video that opens with their own name. Against a typical two-to-five-percent referral rate, Yosef reported on the episode that the program drove a 42 percent share rate and a 47 percent click-through to register.

Live offers, not frozen emails

A static email is frozen the moment it is sent. A Smart Video is not. Yosef described a campaign with Papa John’s where the offer rotates every two weeks and the video carries a live countdown: open it three days later and the clock has genuinely moved, and when the window closes, the same video swaps in whatever is next. The creative stays current without a re-send.

Start with the data you already have

Yosef’s advice to operators is refreshingly unromantic: start with the lowest-hanging fruit, not extreme personalization. A first name or a birthday field is enough to A/B test a birthday video against your current birthday email, and the same applies to the welcome, win-back, anniversary, and end-of-year journeys that already exist in every loyalty platform, most of which are underperforming.

Keeping a human in the loop

On the fear of AI slop, Yosef did not deflect: once trust is gone on the content, it is gone on the brand. The Blings model gets a video to roughly 70 to 80 percent with AI, within about 72 hours, then humans and the client carry it to 100 percent with sign-off, and the algorithm only optimizes between approved variants. The machine picks the winner; it does not pick what ships.

It layers on top of what you already run

One line sums up the fit: “it’s email on steroids.” Blings does not replace a loyalty platform or a CRM; it drops in as a snippet inside the tools operators already use. The company is an official Braze partner and is formalizing partnerships with Paytronix and Punchh, so the video lives natively inside the stack rather than becoming another line item.

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation also covers SMS versus email, the McDonald’s point-balance example, and the Meta template that ran in 33 languages from a single asset. Watch it, listen, or read the transcript:

• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on the Restaurant Technology Guys episode page (Apple Podcasts and Spotify)
• Read the full transcript