MD-Kinney

We take great pride in our industry-leading Client Services team. Sitting down to speak with the MD-Kinney Branding Lead, Kelsey Manlove, reminded us just how important that relationship is.

“It was so nice to have someone who took care of that part for us whereas whenever we were dealing with more of the freelance side, you assume that role as well.” – Kelsey Manlove, MD-Kinney Brand Lead

Having someone handle a project from start to finish is extremely valuable, but aside from great organization, a lot goes into making a fantastic Account Manager. One of the biggest, in our opinion? Managing expectations…

“When I ask about a schedule, you’re honest and up front with me about it. That means that I can go back to my team and it makes it easier for me as well. I also consider you guys really reliable. When I hear someone say you’re going to see something this day, I’ve always seen something by that day. That gives me peace of mind.”

Successful relationships like this have to start from the get-go. That’s why we always set up not only introductory meetings for our teams, but also time to get to know our overall capabilities and products so each brand that works with us gets the most out of their partnership.

“Usually when I am working with third-party vendors, I had never really had anyone reach out to set up an introductory capability meeting. That was really, really helpful.”

CGI has such extensive reuse, it only makes sense that we explain how buildable your projects can be. For example, if you start out with static product renderings, those have great legs! You could use the assets from that first project and expand on them to create anything from Features and Benefits Animations to Product Spinners and more.

If those animations were your highest priority, you can also pull static imagery from your videos! Or, just like MD-Kinney does, you can create shorter clips of the animations to use on, say, your social channels.

Kelsey shared with us that they are more prepared for product launches than they ever have been! Talk about music to our ears.

“We didn’t have that many assets ready before launch. Now I can have content ready to go day one at launch and even have some touches laid out after that. I can now have things done a month and a half ahead of time. That’s the #1 challenge of mine from the past that has been fixed.”

That’s another huge benefit of partnerships with open communication and taking advantage of 3D imagery in general. You don’t have to wait for your product to be completely built and ready to ship. We can take design files and create product imagery so your marketing collateral is ready before the product even is.

“Now, instead of having 20% of our content ready at launch, we’re closer to 75-80% there usually.”

We mentioned how MD-Kinney creates clips of their animations to use on their social channels. That’s not the only way they are getting ROI from a single piece of content.

While they use their collateral created by artists across multiple channels, they are also spreading the ROI across their internal and external teams. Their distributors, who as Kelsey puts it, “are really just as much our customer as our end user really is in some sense”, are using their static and animated imagery as well!

“We will host those images on the distributor portal too so they can use those for their social, marketing needs, third-party advertising, trade shows, or really just anything. They can go on and grab those. There’s nothing better I love seeing than those being shared by our reps on social. They are using those a lot too.”

She went on to explain to us how high-quality imagery is really helping them stick out in the industry with their distributors. They are more likely to use the MD-Kinney content because the brand has put so much emphasis on representing their quality products and how much care and attention they put into everything.

In addition to just sharing their collateral for initial promotion, their distributors are also using them to follow up with leads – getting them further down the funnel and completely validating what MD-Kinney is doing to reach their audiences with the right content.

When we asked Kelsey the number one reason she enjoys partnering with us, she gave us quite possibly the best compliment ever. We value our people so incredibly much; it was wonderful to hear she does too…

“Obviously you guys can tell that I absolutely love the products and everything that goes with it, and I’ve worked with vendors in the past, but the people have all been wonderful. If I ever have questions, you guide me, you assist me, you’re always professional but you’re personable though and you’re very up front and honest.”