Bantam Live

House Production & Casting is a marquee player in the entertainment industry. The firm provides television and film casting services out of its cavernous studios adjacent to their stylish offices located in the Meatpacking district of New York City. House's Brooke Thomas and Mary Egan (pictured) are two of New York City's veteran casting directors who, with their 12-person team in House's television division, cast TV commercials for leading brands. To improve their workflows and productivity, the House team signed on to Bantam in a special pilot program for the last two months, and the productivity results - soon to be presented in a video case study - have been astounding.

The glamor of the entertainment industry often belies the state of sophistication, or lack thereof, in its information technology and production practices. When a casting call audition for a TV commercial is organized, many casting directors in the business today still haphazardly write down lists of actor names when on the phone with talent agents or have them faxed like it's 1985. Using email to coordinate this process remains a messy, inefficient option. And orchestrating these auditions among the casting directors and their assistants and managing the thousands of actors (and their headshot/resumes and social network profiles), talent agents, ad agencies and producers is daunting. Enter Bantam, stage left.

When House signed on to Bantam, their intention was to use Bantam for contact management for the thousands of actors Brooke and Mary have relationships with from their years in the business. Yet they quickly saw the breadth of workspace features in Bantam woven purposefully with social media that allowed them to operate all of their core business activity in this web application. From project management to contact management with integrated social network profile feeds to task assigning to casting call scheduling and calendaring to file sharing and archiving to status updating in "who's doing what" communication in the activity stream of Bantam, House is now in the loop using Bantam to productive effect.

Bantam is an emerging brand. We intentionally don't even have our logo or front-end marketing site fully designed yet as we're observing our early-stage customers and allowing them to inform us about this maturing product through their varied uses and requests. One of the things we didn't want to do was label Bantam strictly "CRM" (customer relationship management). That term is as old as it is vague and certainly doesn't convey what "Bantam Live" can do for companies in ways that even we can't predict. Certainly this is the case with House, who didn't even know they needed or wanted a new social media application that is Bantam. Stay tuned for the video case study of Bantam in the House.