Overview
I was brought onto the Sinclair Digital national sales team as a visual designer for marketing. When I was initially brought on to the team the division was in a massive stage of transition. First the national digital team itself was a fairly young organization and still working to unite the sales team around the country, define processes and standardize offerings.
My Role
I worked as the lead visual designer working closely with national and regional sales managers, internal and external clients and project managers.
Standardize Offering
As I was brought onto the team the larger division's focus was on creating a custom CMS and rolling all of the companies news sites from a dozen different designs on as many CMS on a single unified design. It was my job to work with the UX team to identify where we could insert ads and determining which ad units we would proceed with. Taking into account IAB standards and the contracts that we current had in place we identified our standardized units:
300x250
728x90
320x50 (Mobile Only)
300x600
1320x30 expanding into 1320x300
Wallpaper
160x600 (Bookends)
Interstitial (variable size)
Corner Peel 50x50 expanding into variable size
Display Ads
Once we had determined our ad specs and rolled out our media kit I spent a great deal of my day to day producing display ads. The range of clients could be everything from small local businesses to national campaigns and corporation, including both internal and external clients.
As I worked on this I realized that myself and the other designers we spending a huge amount of time on creating low level creative that we really weren't getting that much of a return on. I found myself thinking about how we could fix this problem and improve our process.
Ad Template
My solution to both the churn and sheer amount of ad production needed for a company of our size was to explore standardized templates. Something that could be used for the mast majority of our clients, especially the low level, smaller and lower revenue generating clients, that could either be quickly used by our team to quickly build the ad unit or even be handed off to production artists and station designers at our individual stations. This would both allow us to increase our production and allow the team to focus on larger initiatives, new client pitches and high value clients.
After proposing this solution we were eventually able to find an external contractor to partner with called LocalStars, which would allow us to not only use the template that I had created but also those they already had in their library but also offered a service easy enough the even sales executives could quickly create spec or actual ads. These would ultimately be approved by our team before being traffic to maintain high quality.
Email Templates
In addition to the display ads and the division offered clients the option of a email campaigns, however there was not standardization about what the templates looked like. We did have a few previous design all of which would need to individually developed and most of which had not had a design update in quite some time. I worked to create a series of standardized templates for emails to prevent future needless excess development and worked closely with developers to create templates that could be built as components allowing an easy mix and match or simplified versions of each design.