Sales Graphics Blog

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.

Click on the image above to see a sample Bravo presentation in action.

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.

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.”

The iPad may have beat out the DVD player to become the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product in history, but this is only the beginning. A growing list of emerging tablets from other contenders will also find their share of early adopters.

What does these mean for business though, and more specifically, what does this mean for your marketing and sales teams?

If you’re SAP, a company that’s been praised for their quick integration of more than 2,500 iPads in the field, then Apple’s iOS is just the first step in a large, fundamental change in the way we do business. In a recent interview in InformationWeek SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann summed up the company’s tablet philosophy succinctly:

At the end, it’s all about the innovation you can bring to the organization. And we have learned that you can get quick wins with the iPad, no question about it, but there are also other devices coming in as well that are also going to be very important.”

Among these devices are the Android Tablet and Blackberry PlayBook, two newcomers that will appeal to different users based on their size, functionality and features. We already have a CustomShow presentation app for the 15 million iPad owners to date, but when it comes to tablets we’re all in. We are excited about tablets that support Flash (basically every tablet except the iPad), because we use Flash to make presentations stand out.

Stay tuned to see how we are leveraging the strengths of each of these tablets to create seamless, high quality presentation solutions you can count on.

USA Network: Characters Welcome

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!

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.