Cox Enterprises is a global conglomerate made up of several large brands, including Cox Automotive Mobility, Auto Trader, and Kelley Blue Book. Cox Enterprises is considered the only company in the world to offer a full range of automobile dealer solutions and they distinguish themselves from their competitors by being a technician-first culture.
Cox Enterprises’ incredible journey began nearly 120 years ago, and it continues today as one of the country’s leading communications, media, and automotive services organizations.
We had the opportunity to interview 2 of the power users who are part of the creative process for Cox Automotive Mobility, Georgia Roy, Product Marketing Manager, and Dave Evans, Marketing Manager, and although they have different backgrounds and responsibilities within the company, both leverage Design Pickle as their creative services partner to improve their turnaround times.
“Graphic design is something I can do, but it is not my strongest suit. So, what may take me hours will take minutes for any of the Design Pickle designers.”
“What I love about Design Pickle is not looking for email attachments. The software is great, you can go back to different versions. You can drag rectangles around graphics and make notes. And it's really so much easier to do that on Design Pickle’s platform than going back and forth over email.”
Cox Enterprises has an internal design agency, which is fantastic at developing their large-scale marketing campaigns. Yet, like many in-house design teams, they serve the entire family of Cox brands, so Georgia and Dave’s projects compete with multiple departments, which means long turnaround times and limitations when trying to move fast.
Before they had Design Pickle, they hired an external agency to meet hot deadlines, which consistently drained their budget, not to mention branding inconsistencies. According to Georgia, “Our internal design agency is working on more long-term and complex campaigns for us that have a lot of different moving parts to them. And we’re happy that they can help us with those. But there are times that we have a presentation with the president of a company, demanding a tighter turnaround deadline where we just definitely needed that extra help.”
Dave’s challenges were similar – and as a former graphic designer and photographer, he used to take matters into his own hands (rather than hire externally like Georgia), which put a toll on him to create and edit any asset that the internal agency couldn’t turn around fast enough. “Our internal agency has finite resources and there’s a lot of planning that goes into it, they plan things pretty far in advance.” When he needed something fast, he used to have to do it himself.
Luckily, a mutual colleague of Georgia and Dave’s approached them and suggested signing up with Design Pickle to escape the outsourcing and DIY-ing. They started with a flat-rate Graphics Pro subscription with one workstream. “It’s really impressive how quickly the [creative] gets delivered. Sometimes I put in four requests at once, and I can rearrange the priority, which is really nice.” The team has since expanded, adding another workstream to ensure at least two concurrent projects are always being worked on. With two active workstreams, they can request a variety of creative assets, from social media graphics to presentation designs, knowing that they will have assets in hand within 1-2 business days, in-budget, and on-brand.
Georgia and Dave’s teams no longer struggle to get their design needs on-time and in-budget. By supplementing their internal agency team with Design Pickle, no one sweats their deadlines anymore, they’ve been able to bring campaigns to market at twice the rate, and deliver custom presentations faster than ever before! As the Cox family of brands expands, the team expects to expand their workstreams, allowing them to scale into the future with the support of Design Pickle.
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