Sales Graphics Blog

It feels like just yesterday that we congratulated Food Network Magazine for making their way onto AdWeek’s annual hotlist, but they’re at it again. Last week Peggy Mansfield and her team at the magazine won two separate min 2011 Integrated Marketing Awards.

Recognized for their integrated marketing efforts, Food Network Magazine took a bite out of the list of accolades with the Marketing Team of the Year and min Marketer of the Year awards. Founding Associate Publisher/Integrated Marketing Director, Peggy Mansfield, led her team to the victory with an industry leading multimedia strategy that brings the magazine to life both on and off the printed page.

Food Network Magazine’s accomplishment comes after a 13.8% ad-page growth through October 2011 78.9% gain in 2010. If they continue to rack up accolades at this rate we may have to start a new blog dedicated entirely to congratulating clients. We’re delighted to see Mansfield and the rest of her team excel and congratulate them all for their achievements.

In the past few years the online video landscape exploded. 86 percent of the American population has consumed an online video in the past month, representing a 706 percent growth in the space since 2006. This represents a significant opportunity for brands who want to use video to augment their marketing objectives.

Some brands take this journey by way of Old Spice style promotions, but every video must fit the personality of the brand, and the best video create some kind of call to action.

One example of this is the latest video we created for L2 Think Tank. A couple weeks ago L2 approached us to design a video infographic that demonstrates the findings in their latest Digital IQ Magazines report.

Because their research is a lead generation vehicle for their memberships, the objective of the video is to increase exposure and put the report in the hands of more people.

We sprung into action and created a video that briefly explains how they ranked the digital acumen of 87 magazine brands (many of whom are our clients). We also animated infographic style findings that demonstrates the most pivotal realizations from the report.

Our animations create an approachable introduction to the research, providing the firm with the lift in downloads that increases lead generation opportunities. For more information on how we can help your brand create marketing videos that align with your business objectives, drop us a message.

Three Sales Graphics clients won top ten spots in Adweek’s most recent annual Hot List, with Food Network Magazine taking the cake. As one of 2011′s hottest magazine brands, Food Network approached Sales Graphics to create a high energy video that shows off the consistency of Food Network’s image across platforms.

In the same way that we bring together creative from other clients like Disney, we gathered the best of Food Network’s glossy pages with the most compelling from the Food Network website and added life to static creative with professional animations. From there we weaved in some programming highlights from Food Network’s television channel.

The result achieved Food Network’s desire to showcase everything that makes the brand so satisfying across platforms. We congratulate them for their well deserved place in the rankings and wish nothing but the best for the Food Network in the second half of the year.

Other Magazines in the Top 10 Who Use Sales Graphics For Presentation Software and Design

• Vanity Fair – Read about an iPad presentation we created for them.
• Elle Decor – Elle Decor uses our presentation software to manage a compelling library of images, videos and slides. Presenters can grab the creative they see fit and add it to any presentation to create a customized experience for each of their advertisers. They also take advantage of our web presentation feature built specifically for large companies.

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.”

To launch their new internal idea-generating program, The Power of Suggestion, Condé Nast turned to the award-winning design team at Sales Graphics to produce a video that showcased some of the many employees at Condé Nast with great ideas to share.

After interviewing over 40 employees and listening to their ideas for how to improve Condé Nast and generate new revenue streams, Sales Graphics edited together a sampling of their ideas and produced an engaging video that helped sell the idea through to senior management.

The “Power of Suggestion” video now lives on Condé Nast’s Intranet to help encourage more employees to share their ideas, and to help Condé Nast continue to be a leader in the media industry.

Glamour Magazine called on Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio to create the video elements for their 2009 Top 10 College Women event. An inspirational event like this needed an inspirational and exciting video to open up the ceremony and a strong graphic style to tie together the ten video bios documented each of the exceptional women honored at the event. Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio created a set of videos fit the bill.

Family Circle Magazine wanted to announce their big September Back-to-School issue in a big way, so they came to Sales Graphics for help. Our Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio created an exciting video email blast that brought to life the beautiful photography and really brought home the point that this was Family Circle’s biggest issue ever!

Sales Graphics was honored last night by the American Business Awards with the 2009 Stevie Award for Best Sales Video of Year for our Glamour.TV Sales Video. Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio, working closely with the great Creative Services team at Glamour Magazine, created an exciting video that showed off Glamour’s great online offering in a 4-minute video that sales people showed on DVDs, laptops and online.

We are always thrilled to receive awards like the Stevie that recognize all of the hard work that our designers and clients put in to create projects like the Glamour.TV video.

min announced their Sales Executive of Year Awards today and we were excited, but not surprised, to see many of our clients listed among the honorees. Working closely with our clients’ sales teams, we have seen their exceptional work close up. And the great work our clients do influences the work that we do at Sales Graphics. Our CustomShow Presentation Software has been made better over the years through feedback, input and suggestions from sales teams like these. And our DesignStudio projects benefit immensely from the creativity and insight of sales teams across the country.