Sales Graphics Blog

When EBONY was born in the 1950s women were romping around in poodle skirts, but today heritage only gets a media brand so far. That’s why new management introduced a revolutionary set of tools to position the JPC brand (EBONY & JET) with the likes of Hearst, Condé Nast, and other major players on the media stage.

Rather than rely on old presentation tools with steep learning curves, EBONY & JET called on our design team to breathe new energy and life into the brand. Then they took the visual refresh a step further and moved the sales team over to our presentation software, CustomShow.

The new design and presentation tools were a perfect match for the brand’s fresh energy, evolving image and new leadership. Video and animations brought EBONY & JET’s allure to life while the presentation tool ramped up productivity and gave the sales team control over the brand’s new and evolving message.

EBONY & JET’s crisp new design and bleeding-edge corporate presentation tools are now the engine for a newly defined, progressive media company. The company’s new presentations didn’t just increase performance and productivity, it started a movement and propelled the media conglomerate into a new generation.

As the VP of Marketing-Media at JCP says:

“When it came time to refresh our brand and reintroduce ourselves to the ad world, we turned to the responsive team at Sales Graphics. They make it easy for us to succeed by helping us appear cutting-edge and vibrant. Our sales team is excited about the new slides, and that has already started to translate into more presentations and more effective sales calls.”

There’s a lot that goes into a perfect iPad presentation app. Sales people want it to look great, IT needs a seamless solution, and the marketing department has to maintain a little control over how brands communicate with prospects. Chance can determine the fate of business presentations. Or you can check out our 2011 list of the best presentation apps for business:

1. CustomShow by Sales Graphics

Flash-like animations and the power to scale across organizations is CustomShow’s bread and butter, but the engine behind this presentation software also powers meetings, on or offline presentations, and the ability to update any number of iPads from one command center.

Bottom Line: CustomShow is one of the few powerful, secure, and simple solutions for business specific iPad presentations.*

2. Idea Flight by Conde Nast

Idea Flight lets one iPad wielding pilot control the screen of everyone else’s iPad so they can see one presentation directly on their personal device. The process is quick and convenient, but remember, as of now anything that can’t be translated into a PDF won’t work with Idea Flight.

Bottom Line: Idea Flight is an inexpensive way to quickly take advantage of iPad adoption in the conference room.

3. Presentation Clock by Shawn Welch

This simple, single purpose app is a master of the timed universe. The large number display shows not only the amount of time left, but also lets speakers (or their timekeepers) offer warning through colored numerals.

Bottom Line: Presentation Clock reminds us time is precious so we can use it effectively.

4. Keynote by Apple

Keynote is one of the most widely recognized iPad presentation apps out there. Its power is in its design and cross platform capabilities, but as we’ve written before, it’s not necessarily the most business friendly app out there. For example, syncing video or other multimedia is quite tedious.

Bottom Line: Keynote’s low barrier to entry makes it the perfect solution for some, but at the end of the day it’s designed for the solitary consumer as opposed to big business.

5. Omnigraph Sketcher

This statistics app is one of the most powerful tools out there for turning hard data into easy to understand graphs right from your iPad. The developers here are so serious about graphs they dedicate plenty of focus on not only making the lines look smooth between data points, but also supporting logarithmic scales on either or both axes.

Bottom Line: Need to add a last minute slide with the latest numbers? Omnigraph Sketcher is perfect for stats and graphs on the go.

*Full disclosure: We develop CustomShow but we’d like to think 50 years focusing on enterprise strength presentations has taught us something.

As 80 percent of businesses reach for the iPad, Apple is making serious B2B strides. The introduction of their Business App Volume Purchasing Program delivers exciting opportunities for not only CustomShow, but for every apps oriented business in existence.

For the first time businesses like ours can host our apps in a private, business only environment. Unlike the previous model where CustomShow had to live alongside other presentation apps open to the public, we now have the flexibility to create a custom site for clients.

This means a more custom experience, volume pricing, and the ability to deal with app purchasing for an unlimited number of employees through a common business account.

Apple’s new webpage for the program reads:

Whether you’re providing apps to two employees or ten thousand, the Volume Purchase Program makes it simple to find, buy, and distribute the apps your business needs.

The Volume Purchase Program also provides a way to purchase custom B2B apps built by third-party developers to meet the unique needs of your business.

Watch for us in Apple’s new, customized business environment soon, as this is just one of many updates expected for our presentation app in the Fall of 2011.

The newest version of CustomShow is well on its way to completion, but before the latest iteration hits prime time we’re rolling out aspects of our presentation offering in small chunks. This paced rollout will build up to one significant update, but current clients and early adopters can already enjoy our enterprise specific online presentation viewer. What does this mean for presenters and sales team? These five features break down CustomShow’s online presentation capabilities for business:

1. Aligned with your workflow. We think about presentations all day everyday, but just because we specialize in everything from design to slide management, doesn’t mean we have to do it all for every client. We work with design teams to give businesses version control and other special presentation features with our presentation software CustomShow, help corporations transition to the iPad, or work specifically on animation design. Whatever the case, our fluid business structure makes it easy for our business to pick up on your business workflow effectively.

2. Built for business. Our secure viewer is run through a secure login system. Sales teams invite viewers to online presentations via email. From there audiences can log in and view their presentation at a scheduled time or whenever it’s convenient.

3. Fit for any situation. Our online presentation viewer works as a standalone product, leave behind, or even in conjunction with CustomShow Web Meetings.

4. We take security seriously. We put managers’ minds at ease with hefty security measures that keep insider presentations confidential. One example of this is our automatically changing encrypted linking structure. Private presentation URLs change every few minutes so even if someone tries to share an unauthorized presentation it will hardly exist before it’s safe in the hands of the company.

5. Everything is trackable. Presentation administrators have access to detailed dashboards with realtime insights on presentation viewership. Data points let managers decipher who has logged in, how long they spent on each slide, and much more. This isn’t just sales team performance measurement, these are the kinds of statistics that can inform client or consumer interests and product development.

Try the Online Presentation Viewer Now

Want to give the online presentation viewer a spin? Follow this link and request an invite. You’ll receive an invite via email and within about thirty seconds you’ll be viewing a sample presentation we created for Bravo.

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.

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When Cablevision spun AMC and WEtv into their own company last year the two sales teams were confronted with a challenge that even the most consistent and longstanding brands face. They needed to figure out how to present a solidified brand image.

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.

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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.

Have you seen the CustomShow iPad app in action? If not you can download it now and view a demo of an iPad presentation we created for Bravo with the links below.

To demo our CustomShow iPad App:

1. Please download our free CustomShow app from the iTunes store.

2. Click this link on your iPad to load a sample presentation.

Although the self guided demo doesn’t show the power and control users have over editing, slide libraries, and version controls across the organization, it does provide a few highlights of the presentation software.  Give it a download and let us know what you think of the Flash-quality graphics and video components on the iPad.

Three years ago the television industry had a realization and Bravo was one of the first to make it a reality. Industry presentations didn’t need to look like static and dreary PowerPoints and the experience of watching an upfront sales presentation could rival that of catching a few highlights from the Real Housewives Reunion. With one quick sweep the network rid themselves of flat, print-like PowerPoints and traded the old ways of presentation management for a type of mobility that was unprecedented within the company.

When we delivered engaging motion graphics and polished creative to Bravo, we connected them to our presentation software, CustomShow. This gave their sales and marketing team the capability to edit our professionally designed presentations from anywhere without having to deal with the version control issues that are so common amongst larger companies. Individual sales people retained editorial control but when company wide updates are necessary all it takes is a single change in the master slide library and the entire company has instant access to the newest and most up-to-date numbers.

As business moves ever faster, this kind of instant update is crucial. It’s also a game changer because it lets sales people move away from the drudgery of constantly sending large files back and forth, and instead lets them spend more time focusing on making the sale. For Bravo it was perfect, and the benefits only extended further when the network decided to buy the sales team iPads.

While others were trying to figure out how to sync Keynote presentation videos to the iPad, Bravo downloaded the CustomShow App and reaped the benefits of being one of the first to deliver motion-filled professional presentations on a device that’s today’s mark of innovation. CustomShow lets Bravo move fluidly across Macs, PCs, tablets and the Web, helping them build business development opportunities for the network across all their platforms.

With our technology Bravo can go everywhere, but what’s more important is that regardless of what comes next, our team will be ready with creative solutions for new innovations in business.

For magazine empire Condé Nast, adapting to the iPad is no longer an experiment, it’s a matter of revenue. The magazine conglomerate is bringing 18 magazines to the iPad, and in doing so they are fundamentally reorganizing the Condé Nast brand with singularity of purpose, vision and execution.

“Readers are engaging with our magazines on the iPad for an average of four hours,” Vice President of Condé Nast Digital Magazine Development Scott Dadich explained at a recent luncheon in New York City. Every customer Condé Nast sees on the iPad spends an average of more than $15 on their digital properties, so brands like Vanity Fair are taking advantage of the appealing nature of magazines on the iPad by moving their sales team to the tablet as well.

Vanity Fair opted to work with us to bring their presentation to life on the iPad, and the final product is both elegant and perfectly complimentary of their in-print property. Complete with animated page turns and and a semi-transparent vellum layer that sits atop each page, the team’s new sales presentation has the kind of panache to which the team aspired when they initially invested in the iPad.

In addition to providing more animation than the team’s presentations had ever had before, the work we did with Vanity Fair spanned across platforms. CustomShow makes it easy for Vanity Fair to manage their presentations on iPads, Macs and PCs, and the brand opted to take advantage of our web presentations and meetings features as well.

The final interactive presentation we created for Vanity Fair fosters the same appeal that inspires readers to interact with magazines on the iPad. It’s cinematic, engaging, and clearly the future of how both businesses and consumers will experience the publishing industry across platforms for years to come. After all, this wasn’t just a presentation experiment, it was a decision to move into the future.