Ellen runs the show with a little help from Salesforce.

For the team behind The Ellen DeGeneres Show, securing the right talent, brand content, and partnerships is crucial to audience engagement.

However, outdated manual processes that relied on email and spreadsheets to keep track of information meant that the members of Ellen’s brand content and partnerships team needed a new and more efficient way to store concepts digitally. With a recently expanded talent roster to keep track of, the team was also struggling to meet everyone’s requirements, from contracting to scheduling and script development.

For more than 17 years and 3,000 episodes, Ellen has been delighting daytime television audiences with its engaging mix of comedy, celebrity and musical guests, and human-interest stories. Boasting a large community of loyal fans, the show has won 63 Daytime Emmy Awards and The Ellen Show has won 21 People’s Choice Awards. Fans engage with the show via its website, ellentube.com, as well as social media channels, games, and apps.

In 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment via Ellen Digital Ventures, which expanded the television franchise into a robust digital business. Recognizing that the existing slow and inefficient manual processes required a revamp, the Ellen team turned to Salesforce for help. Together, they needed a platform that would support and allow the show to manage partnerships more effectively.

“Salesforce supports our business mission of focusing on incredible branded storytelling by helping to keep our business side organized,” said Stephanie Guerrieri, Vice President of Brand Content & Partnerships at The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “It helps us organize the team’s creative ideas, along with our clients, communications, and revenue.”

In the highly competitive entertainment world, it’s crucial to have a strong pipeline of creative ideas and campaigns that excite sponsors and corporate partners — not to mention audiences. Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform allows the Ellen team to digitally store campaign materials such as mock-ups and visuals, ensuring that ideas are preserved for future use. It also means the team can refresh existing materials, rather than starting from scratch every time. That in turn helps teams and individuals become more productive. At the same time, the team is using a custom object that helps track proposals more efficiently, from the initial pitch for a piece of content, right through final approval.

“With Salesforce, we’re able to accelerate the business steps along the way to give our creative team the time required for them to deliver the best product for our clients,” said Guerrieri. “We no longer waste time trying to dig back into contracts and spreadsheets. Instead, with a click of a button, we can see a snapshot of our business.”

Every day, Ellen receives requests for proposal (RFPs) from brands and creative agencies. In the past, these RFPs lived within the email inbox of the person assigned to manage an individual brand. Now, the team at Ellen has plans for the future to use Salesforce’s low-code Customer 360 Platform to build a custom community for potential brand partners, to streamline the process.

When prospective brand partners access the community, they can find Ellen sales materials and submit an RFP. Once the RFP is submitted, the community will create a record in Salesforce that will allow partners to follow the pitch through its entire lifecycle. This will result in easier collaboration, as well as better tracking, communication, and results.

At the same time, Sales Cloud allows Ellen’s account executives to more effectively track pitches for brand content and partnerships in the market.

“With our brand content and partnerships team now on two different coasts, information sharing is more critical than ever in order to drive results,” said Stephanie Walters Kim, the show’s Director of Brand Content & Partnerships. “Previously, we had to call teammates individually to ask for a deal’s history, which took too much time. Now, we trust that everyone is capturing their pitch pipeline in Salesforce, so that at any given time, we know the exact status of any deal.”

As a growing digital business, Ellen Digital Ventures recently expanded its talent roster. New projects have included the launch of a digital program called Momsplaining with Kristen Bell, among others. While the team used to rely on spreadsheets to stay on top of things, they now use Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform to track talent endorsements and brand approvals. As a result, the Ellen team has been able to streamline operations and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

“As our brand content and partnerships work evolves with more complexities and points of business, we are looking forward to layering in new business units — like experiential and e-commerce — and tech partners,” said Alana Calderone Polcsa, Senior Vice President of Brand Content & Partnerships at Warner Bros. Entertainment. “We know that the only way to scale is to add more connections, which will drive efficiencies and scale, and maximize momentum.”