Sales Graphics Blog

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!

The new browser-based interface for CustomShow Web meetings

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.

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.

Scientific American is curious about how things began. So curious, in fact, that they’re dedicating an entire issue to the origins of things. And to help launch this First Annual Origins Issue, Scientific American teamed up with Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio to ask some experts on curiosity how to make this issue as interesting and exciting as possible.

Sales Graphics was honored today as a Finalist for the 2009 American Business Awards for Interactive/Multimedia Sales Presentations and Sales Videos. The projects nominated as finalists were the NBC News Upfront Presentation, the Glamour.TV Sales Video and the Glamour Reel Moments Video.

Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio was awarded a Bronze 2009 Summit Creative Award in this year’s Summit International Awards Competition for the “Glamour Reel Moments” Sales Video produced for Glamour Magazine. The international panel of judges was made up of agency and design professionals from around the world.

It’s nice when a institution of higher learning validates what you’ve known all along. In this case, Harvard Business School posted a short piece titled “When Video Beats PowerPoint” that pretty much makes the case for what Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio has been doing for over a decade! A presentation is a unique opportunity to engage your audience with more than written words (if all you needed was words, you could have sent an email). Video, animation, music and interactivity are all tools that can be used effectively to engage viewers and involve them in the story you’re telling.