Case Study

ITV: Streamlining Sales Operations and Delighting Audiences with Creative, High-Quality Content Globally

ITV Backstory

As an integrated producer and broadcaster, ITV is the largest commercial television network in the United Kingdom. With over 46,000 hours of content in their catalogue, Global Distribution is the division which sells programmes and content which are created by production companies within ITV Studios or by third party producers, all around the world.

The Challenge

ITV’s goal is to be more than TV by creating meaningful and creative content that connects millions of people around the world every day. To successfully execute on this strategy, the company began to pursue a company-wide digital transformation. The transformation would help streamline employees’ business processes and access to the right data at the right time. The Global Distribution Sales team, in particular, is the core department responsible for selling and distributing ITV shows and content to the world.

The company initially implemented an integration tool to connect SQL Server data into Salesforce so that Sales and Finance teams had a single view of their data in a single platform. For five years, however, ITV was able to only take advantage of two integrations. “We were looking to scale out Salesforce and get as much information as we could to the business, but whenever we brought up the need to build integrations to get things done, people would say that integration was not within their skill set. Integration is a very daunting word,” said Phil Maguire, Application Service Delivery Manager at ITV. “My team couldn’t rely on consultants to build out integrations with our previous integration tool, and we needed a better alternative, one that doesn’t require specialized technical skills to automatically upload or update data into Salesforce.”

Maguire’s team of three people, composed of Salesforce administrators, were often tasked to manually upload spreadsheets into Salesforce, taking up valuable time. And that’s when Maguire sought for a better integration approach to their existing integration tool.

The Solution

After learning that the central ERP team at ITV was already using SnapLogic to modernize and replace their legacy integrations, Maguire decided to replace their integration tool with SnapLogic. “We didn’t need two integration platforms running in the company, nor did we need different teams with different skills to operate them,” said Maguire. “And because SnapLogic takes a low-code approach, we wouldn’t need to set aside additional budget to hire specialists to develop integrations.”

Once they had access to SnapLogic, Maguire and his team replaced their existing Salesforce integrations by rebuilding them within 3 days using SnapLogic. The integrations would automatically upload and/or update catalog data each day from their License & Rights management system to a SQL Server database and into Salesforce. As a result, sales people can report exactly which licenses or rights are sold in near real-time. The team also connected data from their campaign management system and SQL Server to Salesforce for sales teams to view information on what advertisements are being sold for each channel and digital hub, enabling them to better manage and forecast sales and revenue.

As the team builds more Salesforce integrations, a valuable skill the team did not have before SnapLogic, their confidence in building more sophisticated and robust integrations is resulting in new integrations that take less than 6 weeks to build. For example, ITV’s core catalog, an archive of all their content, is connected to Salesforce. The editorial metadata of shows within the core catalog is automatically updated in Salesforce, which enriches the existing information hosted in Salesforce. Sales can also obtain catalog data they need within seconds by simply typing in the production number, enabling them to speed up operations and deliver content to clients more quickly. “This was a more sophisticated workflow that we built as we configured more complex parameters, exceptions, and logic into the pipelines to help our sales team get the data they need,” said Maguire.

Whenever the sales team sells a clip or a piece of content, the Fulfillment team needs to send the content in the format the clients need to Salesforce. The custom fulfillment management tool, however, was not connected to Salesforce, requiring Maguire’s team to manually upload spreadsheets that included content files into Salesforce in order to fulfill the sales. This manual process delayed the fulfillment process. Maguire along withhis Salesforce Admins then used SnapLogic to link the fulfillment management tool with Salesforce to automate the fulfillment process, sending the content in the right format into Salesforce once the sale was completed.

Business Results

Since using SnapLogic, the Salesforce team has delivered data to business stakeholders whenever they need it to achieve the company’s strategy. With a low-code approach, the Salesforce team has been able to build integrations on-demand without relying on technical resources while eliminating time-consuming manual data uploads thanks to SnapLogic’s automation capabilities.

ITV continues on their digital transformation journey to further expand global reach, delighting more people around the world with their content. Maguire and his team are looking forward to connecting Salesforce with their new ERP system, Oracle Cloud, so that more stakeholders beyond the 90+ Global Distribution Sales people get access to the data they need for analytics and reporting.