Exponetic

Discovery Network sales presentation

Discovery Networks required an interactive presentation to help them sell advertising space on their television network.

The aim of the project was to give as close to powerpoint functionality in an online application, whilst ensuring that brand guidelines were
adhered to

Background

Discovery Networks have for years used a DVD presentation to sell advertising space on their networks worldwide. This can be costly to produce, difficult to change, and is not available online.

Working with Tsubo Design, Exponetic produced a content managed version of this presentation which would be easier to change and also allow links to the presentation to be sent out to key media buying personnel in target organisations.

Project aims

The aim of the project was to give as close to powerpoint functionality in an online application, whilst ensuring that brand guidelines were adhered to. Although it was expected that Discovery staff would not create whole presentations online the system was to give them the facility to amend slide content, such as facts, figures and text, and provide a quicker update interface for Tsubo to incorporate rich media in the presentation.

As well as running online the system is deployed onto the laptops of Discovery’s sales staff. An update facility is used to check for content changes in the online version and retrieve only those files that have changed since their last update. It also retrieves higher quality versions of streaming media to give an appearance of the same standard as the original DVD.

Process

Tsubo Design have long been responsible for producing the DVD content. This was done by taking a powerpoint presentation and translating it into an interactive (and branded) experience using Macromedia Director. For the new project it was decided to use Macromedia Flash because of its data integration capabilities, particularly with XML.

Working with Tsubo, who were producing the Flash interface, Exponetic defined the XML data structure which would create the presentation. From there we produced a bespoke content management system that allowed a full range of functions including adding, deleting and re-ordering slides, adding, removing and editing content, as well as uploading multimedia elements such as video and other Flash movies for incorporation into the presentation.