Sales Graphics Blog

After multiple years of consecutive growth, BIO has proven that they are a strong cable channel serious about story and narrative. A&E and BIO’s SVP of Marketing, Guy Slatterly, won CableFAXIE’s Marketer of the Year Award in 2009 when the channel grew an impressive 23 percent. And then there’s the fact that BIO is consistently nominated for (and is a frequent winner of) the most outstanding nonfiction series in the Emmys.

As the company that makes upfront presentations for A&E, Bio, Lifetime, and History Channel (snippet from the BIO presentation pictured above), we wish the channel and their sales team continued success both on air and in day-to-day meetings.

A couple weeks ago on the Sales Graphics news blog we offered a glimpse into the presentation we prepared for Telemundo’s upfront party. Our blog readers were presented with a teaser of the intergalactic video reel we created for the IMAX screen at the Museum of Natural History, but for those interested in the scope of the event, Empire Entertainment just added their own writeup and image gallery from the party.

Here’s how Empire Avenue described the moment our work went on display for the Spanish language network:

A powerful opening video sequence featuring moving graphics, animations and programming highlights kicked off the show and took the audience for a lightspeed ride into the Upfront presentation.”

For more examples of presentation videos we’ve created for clients, visit the Sales Graphics portfolio.

When it comes to large organizations making sure everyone is on the same page is difficult enough, but for two brands who had just merged, it seems the challenges would be numerous. AMC uses widescreen for example, while WEtv prefers to stick with the standard 4:3 presentation layout.

Fortunately for everyone involved, a few members of the team had a bit of experience with our presentation software, CustomShow. Before long the sales teams at both WEtv and AMC had signed up and they recruited us to work on their upfronts.

AMC commissioned us for the second year in a row to create their presentation. Our goal was give viewers a taste of each property and then delve deeper on demand into the content that’s necessary for making buying decisions. WEtv, on the other hand, enlisted us to adopt some of their existing creative into a compelling animated presentation.

Today everything both teams need is accessible on demand through a unified slide library. Managers control which presentation slides are editable and which are indispensable, updates can be sent team-wide, and perhaps most important of all, the sales and marketing teams at WEtv and AMC have become unified by a slide library that lets them keep their brand image intact.

This year the Telemundo upfront event swung into action on high definition IMAX screens in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. The wall filling graphics that covered the big screen during the event jettisoned viewers into a Telemundo experience highlighting the network’s most significant accomplishments to date, but thanks to CustomShow, the presentation from that night lives on in the hands of the Telemundo sales team.

It all started when the Spanish-language broadcast network commissioned Sales Graphics to create a “Welcome to Our World” space themed multimedia experience. We designed the graphics for their online media kit and created a consistently branded look-and-feel for their Museum of Natural History event, but the space flying didn’t end when the IMAX screens turned off for the night.

Instead, our presentation software CustomShow let the Telemundo sales team re-use and reintegrate the stellar space experience into everything they employ to sell the network across multiple devices. Everything that exploded off of Internet browsers and the IMAX screen at the upfront was ready for delivery the next day on laptops and iPads.

Telemundo didn’t miss a beat. In fact, their “Welcome to Our World” presentation on CustomShow turned out extremely well. The sales team that uses it in the field might say CustomShow handles like PowerPoint on steroids, but for everyone who has seen the cinematic experience on the iPad or an IMAX screen, the brand’s upfront feels more like a movie.

USA Network: Characters Welcome

USA Network asked us to design their Upfront presentation to match their on-air brand. Using our CustomShow® presentation software, we were able to bring their characters to life inside each slide. The presentation included interactive nagivation and a wide selection of videos.

Thank you to the Fitting Group, who is featuring our CustomShow presentation software in Challenger Brand News this week. We are indeed going up against Goliath in the form of Microsoft PowerPoint. The good news is that no one loves PowerPoint, everyone simply tolerates it.

As mentioned in the article, we’ve been able to convince major brands to switch to CustomShow. Our customers include “DIRECTV, CNN, Bravo, The New Yorker, A&E, ELLE, The Wall Street Journal and Dior. And that’s just the short list.”

Here’s what Challenger Brand News has to say about CustomShow:

Beyond being dazzling, CustomShow sports a number of boons. On the one hand, it allows control over the information being presented in a way that ensures that the company’s brand guidelines are consistent. But on the other, it allows quick and easy customization of presentations to permit flexibility.

More than anything, CustomShow is a presentation program for a world with a short attention span and high visual expectations.

And they don’t even mention our new Web meeting capability, which plays high-definition video smoothly. You can find the entire Challenger Brand article here.

The National Geographic Channel will roll out CustomShow as its enterprise presentation platform for Advertising Sales. This means that the entire sales team will have eye-catching animated slides at their fingertips. These slides will update themselves, saving the sales team hours of work every time they customize a presentation.

The Nat Geo marketing team will rely on CustomShow to effectively manage and update their library of slides and presentations throughout the year for their entire sales team. CustomShow lets them control message and design across the company in real-time.

Nat Geo joins a growing list of Fox Cable Networks that are using CustomShow to manage their presentations, including F/X, Big Ten, SPEED, FUEL, Fox Sports Net, and Fox Affiliates.

MTV Networks Entertainment Group chose Sales Graphics to design their 2010 Digital Upfront presentation. They’re also using CustomShow to deliver and manage the slides across their entire salesforce.