Sales Graphics Blog

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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.

In the midst of diagrams and bullet points it’s easy to forget, but in the board room the presentation is the product. Of course facts and figures are a part of the complete picture, but any good sales person would agree that coming as close as possible to reproducing the actual product is indispensable to making the sale.

That’s what ESPN The Magazine kept in mind when they made the leap to Sales Graphics and CustomShow. The magazine armed their entire sales team with professional presentations but didn’t stop there. Instead of sending them into the field with still images of ad units, they used our design services to animate the look and feel of even the most complicated paper fold. This is the power of CustomShow.

Sales Graphics, unlike other professional design services, provided ESPN The Magazine with animation while allowing them maintain total control over wording and content. Backgrounds could move and ad units in motion illuminated the power of advertising with the magazine, but all the research and copy remained easily editable on both Macs and PCs.

CustomShow also allows ESPN The Magazine to publish the presentation to iPads. When it comes time to update or make changes across the sales team everything updates quickly and easily, but only when each presenter believes the time is right. In other words, CustomShow solves the problem of dealing with an entire fleet of presentation decks without forcing updates on the sales team right when they’re walking into their next meeting.

In the end CustomShow delivered the flexibility of a do it yourself presentation option while maintaining the look and feel of a professional solution. ESPN The Magazine was delighted. In fact, here’s what they wrote afterward:

Just wanted to drop a note to say that your team did a fantastic job on the ESPN The Magazine deck. We are really pleased with the results and the presentation really helps the magazine stand out. Besides it looking great, the presentation also worked flawlessly on our computers and that was a huge win for us.”

It’s been several months since we released our CustomShow iPad app, and we’ve been receiving terrific feedback from our customers. Here are a few success stories we’ve heard:

“Our presentations look beautiful on the iPad!” “The iPad makes it easy to catch someone in a hallway or a restaurant and give them a quick pitch.” “Twice in the past few weeks I have pitched people with our iPad app and they’ve said, ‘I dont normally do this but I’m going to say yes right here in this meeting. We’re definitely going to purchase from you.’ It’s an amazing sales tool and it’s delivering results.” Here are some of the key benefits we built into the app:

• Presentations to look great because of the iPad’s glossy screen and quick response times.
• People can present with or without a network connection, because WiFi and even 3G are often unavailable or slow .
• Presentations to update themselves when new versions are published, so people never need to worry if they’re using the correct slides.
• One person or department can easily manage presentations on hundreds (or even thousands) of iPads.
• Our iPad app supports a projector or second screen for larger meetings.

Download the CustomShow app from iTunes here, and you can find more info on our site. We look forward to hearing about your experience.

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.

If your company uses Web meetings, you already know what would make them better: HD video, full-screen transitions between slides, mixing slides from different presentations, a preview of the next slide, no need to launch a separate application to host meetings, and lower cost than the competition. We’ve been hard at work making all of these things happen — right from CustomShow!

Here’s what makes our Web meetings exciting:

HD video: CustomShow now lets you present full-screen video to your audience over the Web.

Full-screen transitions between slides: Existing Web meeting software translates your PowerPoint slides into a low-quality experience that stutters and stalls. CustomShow Web meetings offer a high-quality experience that looks every bit as great as being in the same room.

Mixing slides from different presentations: CustomShow makes it easy to pull slides from multiple places into a single Web meeting. No more switching between applications or launching files while your audience watches.

Preview of the next slide: It’s easy to forget what’s coming next in the heat of the moment. CustomShow displays the next slide before your audience sees it, so you never have to wonder.

Single app: Part of what makes existing Web meeting software so frustrating is that it’s a separate application. CustomShow is your presentation software, and now it’s also your Web meeting software. There’s no difference, there’s nothing else to launch, and it works smoothly.

Less expensive than the competition: We’ve priced our Web meetings significantly below existing Web meeting products.

We’ll be posting more info soon, and please feel free to contact us immediately for more info.

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.