Katz Media Group
The US’s largest media sales firm uses RingEX to better serve its thousands of clients.
800
employees across the US now on a centralized communications platform
10+
communication apps (message, video, phone) consolidated into one
275,000,000
consumers reached every week with ad messages sold by the company
RingCentral lets us bring together all of our 800 employees, who are scattered all over the US, and let them connect by phone, team message, and video all in one shared digital environment. For a company that was using a different on-prem telephony system at every office, this unified communication capability feels nothing short of magical.
Robert Lyons
Chief Technology Officer
The largest media representation firm in the United States
When advertising agencies want to run media campaigns on radio, television, or digital platforms, the name they think of first is Katz Media Group. The company that literally invented the concept of a media representation firm—way back in 1888—and today Katz has grown to become one of the largest in the industry.
If you consume broadcast or digital media in any format, chances are a Katz media partner has reached you. The company sells advertising on more than 3,400 radio stations and 800 TV stations, delivering messages to more than 275 million consumers every week.
INDUSTRY
Advertising sales
HQ
New York City, NY
YEAR FOUNDED
1888
EMPLOYEES
800+
The one-stop media partner needed an all-in-one communications platform
For several years, Katz had been executing a cloud-first strategy, moving many of its in-house IT technologies to web-based solutions. Robert Lyons, Katz’s Chief Technology Officer, notes that telephony was among the last on the list.
“Our phone infrastructure consisted of on-prem PBX systems at our offices around the country. Everyone in the company had gotten comfortable using desk phones and landlines, which was a big part of the reason we were slow to replace that infrastructure with a cloud solution.”
But as Telecommunications Director Barbara Rossi points out, maintaining that familiar telephony environment for employees came at a price. “We had no companywide directory, and had to oversee and fix aging PBX hardware at every location. From an administrative standpoint, it was a challenge”
As Robert also explains, moving to a cloud-based unified communications platform would solve other efficiency challenges and cut costs. “We had many communication apps and vendor relationships—multiple phone systems and carrier contracts, different tools for video conferencing, and others for team chats. In addition to creating challenges keeping everyone connected, that infrastructure was also costing more than it should.”
As the head of our telecom function, I’m getting a lot of value from RingCentral’s reporting and analytics capabilities. I can see who’s using which tools—the phone system, the messaging, the video calls. If some departments or regions aren’t adopting certain features, then we know to add training sessions or send out helpful tips and tricks. It’s helping us boost adoption.
Barbara Rossi
Director of Telecommunications
RingCentral’s unified cloud platform proved invaluable from day one
Robert and Barbara were midway through Katz’s company-wide deployment of RingEX when the COVID pandemic broke out. As Robert explains, the sudden transition to remote work could have proved disruptive to a company whose headquarters was in one of the country’s hardest-hit cities.
“New York City officials were talking about closing bridges and restricting movements, which would have kept us locked out of our main office, where half of the company works. But because RingCentral let us put our business phone service, team messaging, and video conferencing on everyone’s phones and laptops, we didn’t need to worry about not being able to access our on-prem PBX. Our transition to remote work was basically seamless.”
Finding many ways to improve operations with RingCentral
Katz’s employees have used the company’s new unified communications platform in numerous ways to improve their productivity and daily workflows. As one example, Robert cites the benefits that Katz’s sales teams are enjoying with RingCentral.
“Most of our workforce are sales reps who spend a good portion of their days working with media buyers to build effective campaigns for ad agencies and their advertiser clients. Being able to take those calls on their work numbers—from anywhere—had a very positive effect on our responsiveness to clients and our sales teams’ ability to close business. This mobility was obviously essential during the lockdowns, but it would’ve added enormous value for our sales efforts even without COVID.”
Katz’s employees are also improving productivity and teamwork using RingEX’s built-in team messaging platform. John Iacono, Manager of Customer Support, explains that the messaging function is making it easier than ever for cross-functional teams to manage complex initiatives.
We can run entire projects in RingCentral. We create a dedicated group for chats and use the RingCentral Dropbox integration to share document links. If we want to discuss something with the group, we fire up a conference call or a video chat, all without ever leaving the RingCentral app. It’s like a one-stop-shop for managing our group projects.
John Iacono
Manager of Customer Support
Extending the value of RingCentral with app integrations
Robert also notes that when he and his team researched the RingCentral App Gallery, they discovered even more ways to improve company operations.
The Dropbox for RingCentral integration is one example, Robert explains. “What’s great about this integration is that it improves our everyday workflows in two important ways. We can easily share our Dropbox links in the RingCentral messaging platform, and we can automatically save our business voicemails from RingCentral to a shared Dropbox folder.”
The Dropbox for RingCentral integration is one example, Robert explains. “What’s great about this integration is that it improves our everyday workflows in two important ways. We can easily share our Dropbox links in the RingCentral messaging platform, and we can automatically save our business voicemails from RingCentral to a shared Dropbox folder.”
Another integration that’s saving Katz’s employees a considerable amount of time and effort, Robert adds, is WebHooks for RingCentral.
“Our application development team uses the RingCentral WebHooks integration to automate the process of turning a development issue into a RingCentral team message. If an event in one of our apps triggers a notification, rather than sending that out as an email, it now goes straight into the RingCentral messaging group that our developers have open all the time. That’s a huge timesaver.”
One of the things I find most valuable about RingCentral is the ecosystem of apps available to integrate into our communications platform. We’ve connected it to our environments for Dropbox, WebHooks, and Outlook. We even used a RingCentral API to integrate our customer support team’s phone service with their help desk platform (Freshservice). Those integrations are adding massive efficiencies to our workflows.
Robert Lyons
Chief Technology Officer