Comcast Cable's online approval

When you’re America’s leading provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services, with more than 24 million cable customers, 12 million high-speed internet customers and three million voice customers, a consistent brand identity is a key requirement.

However, for Comcast Cable Corporation, ensuring that its customised marketing materials have a consistent brand identity was a long and costly process, until it discovered the benefits of an online design and production system.
For storing marketing materials Comcast uses a web portal, ComcastStore, used by 20,000 field marketers and partner agencies.

Even though marketing materials were stored in a web portal, customising, proofing, approving and printing the pieces was still a manual process. If a marketer wanted to customise a marketing document, they would have to send it to a customer service representative for approval.

This would be passed to a vendor for manual editing and providing physical proofs. The time taken for this process could take between four to 16 days.

Sean McKenzie, senior director of marketing business applications for Comcast, says: “We have quarterly campaigns with over 20 million print items, which would take almost three months to produce. It was not an effective process.”

As around 65% to 70% of ComcastStore’s materials needed to be localised, the company decided to streamline its workflow.

Comcast chose interactive technology agency DPCI to provide online customisation and approval by adding online publishing services to ComcastStore.

Joseph Bachana, president of DPCI, says: “We worked with Comcast to allow field marketing personnel to easily create, proof and order customised marketing solutions online, without requiring any technical expertise in Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.”

This provides a much smoother production process. McKenzie explains: “The field team make their customisations to template-based materials online, removing the need for designers to change the files.

“Within a few seconds they receive a file showing the customisation, while the software ensures that it keeps within our predefined prepress and branding rules.
“They accept the proof and either download and print it, or the printer is sent a link to download it. The time from ordering to print now only takes hours instead of days.”

Comcast implemented this new solution in the beginning of 2008, but the realisation that things needed to improve occurred many years ago, back in 2002.

McKenzie explains: “From an organisational viewpoint, it took a while for us to invest and agree on a process. As the individual field teams control a lot of the marketing and budgets, it meant that around 170 different locations were doing their own thing. So there was some pushback, but the cost and soft benefits soon shone through.”

During the time taken to implement the system, many of Comcast’s creative agencies moved from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign, so the system had to be adapted to accommodate the company’s changing needs. ComcastStore itself also had to receive a redesign to allow users to create online customisations.

McKenzie says that having templates that can be individually tailored online has made the field teams feel more in control. However, as the level of customisations for each template are determined by head office, Comcast is assured that there is brand consistency within all marketing materials.

“Before, the concern was that individuals may completely change the materials if they were able to customise and print them directly, which may result in them placing incorrect legal disclaimers or using rights managed images incorrectly in other materials if they had the file,” McKenzie adds.

“But now they can tailor their communications to best motivate the customer, and we do not need to worry about compromising brand identity or any legal restrictions.”

Another benefit of DPCI’s software is that Comcast can move quicker to market with competitive offers and accurate, localised messages.

DPCI’s online publishing system also offers better metrics to measure campaign effectiveness, and through the new and improved ComcastStore, the company expects to reduce versioning and distribution costs by 60%.

The success of the new ComcastStore is already showing, so the company is planning to start producing its new customer welcome packs through the system. It also wants to incorporate its DAM software into ComcastStore, and enable users to place the same customised details across different templates, instead of making the amendments for each one.


• www.comcast.com
• www.databasepublish.com