Suddenlink offers TV, Internet and phone service to customers across several different regional markets and prides itself on cutting edge marketing programs. Jerry Dow, Suddenlink CMO, had a vision of creating a new marketing campaign that would enable each regional market to delivery more relevant and more effective messages to their specific audience. In order to execute this campaign successfully, the creative would have to be consistent with corporate brand messaging and maintain premium quality while being flexible enough to deliver relevant offers to each local market. The team needed a solution that would allow corporate marketing to build dynamic story boards that enable flexible and yet efficient TV ad creation. These ads would then be available for the regional teams to customize messages and offers that would resonate with their audience, for example featuring local messages such as “I love West Texas”.

Visible World Conductor was a great fit, a solution to help empower regional teams with flexible marketing campaigns that they could use to fit their localized needs. Suddenlink worked with The Richards Group to develop top quality creative that was modular and flexible for message customization, localization, and optimization. The Visible World Conductor enabled the regional field marketers to access the corporate approved creative, customize their own spots on the fly, and deliver the ad to the appropriate market.

The results of deploying Visible World Conductor were fantastic. The Richards Group reported that estimated cost savings for Q3 are anywhere from $85K to $110K in post-production costs alone; this does not include the additional cost savings from streamlining trafficking via DG FastChannel. To provide some perspective on the production efficiencies associated with the Visible World Conductor, upon launch there were 70 unique, customized TV ads created in the first few days of the campaign. Using traditional customization methods, it would have cost at least twice as much and taken significantly longer to execute such targeted and localized TV ad campaign. Beyond the significant cost savings, the solution was also able to improve Suddenlink’s overall marketing results. Visible World Conductor enabled the regional marketing teams to execute flexible campaigns with relevant localized messages that proved to increase engagement and brand awareness.

As Comcast corporate marketing was pre­paring for the launch of its new “Comcastic” branding campaign, they were presented with a distribution challenge. What is the best way to distribute a large number of new and highly customizable broadcast assets while remaining compliant with SAG agree­ments and mitigating risk associated with rights management? The team needed a more efficient and automated alternative for digitally distributing spots to network affili­ates and cross channel locations. Addition­ally, they wanted to prevent field marketers from reusing bits and pieces of the existing assets when creating their own locally produced spots.

Visible World Conductor addressed the immediate need of being able to electronically deliver all spots directly to the station, which also eliminated the risk of the field misusing pieces of the assets. The solution made it possible for spots to arrive next day, compared to the three to four day lead time previously required. It also enabled the field marketers to create as many as nine customized ver­sions of each spot quickly and easily, com­pared to four versions developed in the past. These advanced customization capabilities enabled them to localize the spots and make the messages relevant to the audience of the local markets. The field was now also able to select the most appropriate call-to-action, price point and even product place­ment for their ad in seconds, all while retain­ing the look and feel of the corporate cam­paigns. “Visible World Conductor enabled us to ensure brand consistency and made the ad customization and delivery process cheaper, quicker and more controlled,” said Sean McKenzie, Senior Director of Corpo­rate Marketing with Comcast.

The results speak for themselves. Adoption rates for corporate creative continue to in­crease. “We are hearing from the field that they are actually waiting for us to upload spots into the Dashboard as opposed to paying for a manual fulfillment option,” said Sean. In fact, field adoption of corporate-produced spots has grown from approxi­mately 30% in 2005 to a projected 95% in 2009. Corporate marketing is now able to ensure a consistent look and feel for cam­paigns deployed in the field, while the local field marketing teams gain access to the higher quality creativity developed by first tier agencies at a reasonable price. As im­portantly, Comcast has been able to achieve significant cost savings by using Conductor. “We have been able to reduce the costs for versioning and distribu­tion by as much as 60%. With the help of Visible World we are able to streamline the versioning process, provide the field more flexibility in customizing their spots, and maintain brand equity all while saving costs. This effort has been a huge success for us,” said Sean McKenzie.

A major automotive brand leveraged Visible World dynamic video customization technology to reduce production costs, time and errors associated with the update of local TV advertising campaigns. Requirements included being able to process a large number of customized versions as well as seamless integration with their field marketing operations, legal review process and traffic department.

Both time and costs associated with the production, review and traffic of the market specific customized local TV advertising campaigns was reduced by more than 50%. In addition, the largely automated system greatly reduced human errors and made talent compensation tracking easier and more accurate.