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Challenge: Fox needed a site for their local ad sales and affiliate community. Previously, they had been mailing out expensive promotional kits containing ad slicks, photos, schedules, program clips and promotional. This was costing the company millions of dollars a year in production and postage costs. In addition, the materials were often outdated by the time they reached the recipients. Fox was looking for a way to move this information in a more cost-efficient and timely way. In addition, the interface and structure of the distribution tools had to be simple and intuitive enough for the least technically savvy affiliate to easily download the materials he or she needed. Solution: We designed a system that allowed all of the digitized assets to be centrally stored and catalogued, so the affiliates and ad salespeople could download the most up-to-date files as soon as they were posted. After logging in to the password protected site, the affiliate was given access to a full range of promotional materials, including downloadable Quark files of the ad slicks, QuickTime movies of programs, tools for finding local representatives and an affiliate community area for sharing success stories. Our first concern when designing the interface was to make it simple, straightforward, and intuitive. We incorporated the bracket theme from Fox Family's newly redesigned logo into the overall page design, framing the main menu with a bracket. On every subpage, we presented the information in bordered blocks, constraining it to manageable portions and using a clear information hierarchy. We used the language that was already standard within the affiliate community to name the site sub-sections so that it would be familiar to the affiliates, many of whom would have never used a web application before. The results were amazing. In less than a year, Fox Family had completely stopped mailing out promotional kits and was saving millions of dollars annually while relying solely on the online distribution network that we designed and put in place.
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