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.

Despite critics’ threats of television’s impending demise in advertising demand, the Fall 2011 upfront season was a fruitful one for the major networks. The biggest U.S. television networks increased their advertising revenue by 8.1 percent, but for Sales Graphics’ client NBC, the growth rate was even higher.

NBC emerged from the upfronts with a nine percent increase over last year, proving that the DVR and the economy were not enough to stop the network from growing. Interested in the kind of creative that the network uses to command this kind of success? Take a look at a presentation we made in the past for NBC News Networks for the 2009 upfront and view a cinematic email blast MSNBC commissioned us to create for their recent rebranding effort.

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.