Across the spectrum of products, including Barbie and Hot Wheels, a significant amount of technical and preparatory work is invested in crafting customer presentations and supporting a company’s branding and messaging. Mattel, a well-known toy brand, has chosen to partner with Clear-Com® to develop a voice communication solution, ensuring their corporate video production team maintains uninterrupted connectivity.
At Mattel, the core focus of their customer presentations and corporate productions revolves around the principles of education, engagement, and collaboration. To maintain a cohesive approach and consistently provide a positive customer experience, Mattel’s Senior AV Technician and Audio Engineer, Jose Robles, places his trust in Clear-Com. He continually tests their system as a reliable communication tool for his AV production and corporate team, ensuring seamless operations.
Mattel’s corporate video production unit creates captivating content, from webinars to sales presentations, enabling flexible messaging. Robles excels in overcoming event production challenges for seamless execution.
“Clear-Com offered us a network-friendly communications system to tie our six studios and our main corporate tower together – an extensive infrastructure that we need to keep connected,” comments Robles. “We host many live event presentations with broadcast quality content and technology, bringing people together from all over the world, and have created an environment for high-value production and presentations. That’s why we opted for the Arcadia® IP platform and FreeSpeak II® technology – it’s perfect for our corporate AV over IP environment that requires a large deployment of wireless users across multiple locations. We often must expand our communications to multiple venues and integrate outside participants or remote members of our production team. By using our existing IP network, we can quickly and reliably expand our intercom system.”
Arcadia Central Station is Mattel’s central communications hub, streamlining brand experiences for customers like Disney, Amazon, Costco, and more. By integrating network switches, Clear-Com’s LQ Series, and third-party Dante devices, a smart IP communications solution has been created across Mattel’s infrastructure. Robles and his AV team now manage communications from a single location, eliminating the need for complex intercom systems scattered across the network. Clear-Com’s configuration software enables quick user setup and remote troubleshooting, while the system can expand easily by adding more transceivers and belt packs.
“We also added fibre throughout our buildings, which combined with our Arcadia IP intercom system has been a game-changer,” adds Robles. “This is helping us futureproof our infrastructure against increased video bandwidth, allowing us to transmit more data, audio, and video. I can simply patch any channel with another building now through fibre. Plus, we can transmit our content and communicate effectively during our productions over longer distances than ever before, and without signal interference. All ideal for our campus-wide AV systems, conferences, and presentations.”
From pre-production to each corporate production, dependable and coordinated communications are a priority for Mattel. “Clear, instant, and direct communication between the camera crew, producer, lighting crew, floor manager, and the rest of our team in any of our live productions is critical to ensure everything is working smoothly,” continues Robles. “It’s an immediate connection, so our team can talk and listen in real-time with their hands-free.”
The pandemic showed Mattel that remote was becoming the new reality, and today their production team is using a hybrid model that works well for them. During the pandemic, Mattel’s corporate productions and customer presentations continued during a period when many companies ceased operations. With the assistance of Clear-Com’s IP capabilities, the company provided remote access and comms for their technical team and customers to participate and interact in productions regardless of their location. This exercise proved that remote production and all the essential team communications around it could work well. “We’re just providing our team with the right tools to perform their job offsite, and they’ve all really embraced this IP-centric approach,” continues Robles.
Mattel also opted for Agent-IC mobile app licenses, which add intercom functionality on mobile devices. This app connects to Mattel’s network, allowing remote production team members access to its intercom channels. “It’s been like communications glue for our team, and we were able to maintain our usual workflow seamlessly. Agent-IC is a vital part of the success of our productions as it provides an intercom panel on a mobile device, giving our remote team the communications connectivity they need. I really love the combination of Clear-Com technology – the wired and wireless options plus Agent-IC. It’s really helped remove a lot of the unnecessary back-and-forth emails that can waste time and energy for our production team as conversations are now in real-time. From a technical standpoint, I can fine-tune the intercom channels, adjust the gain to improve the sound for comms users, and troubleshoot with audio engineers in another building, all from my central control room.”
For Mattel, the benefits of effective production communications include increased engagement with its B2B customers, effective sales and marketing, and enhanced internal communications. “Clear-Com Arcadia, FreeSpeak II, and Agent-IC have really supported us in our customer engagement strategies, taking our video productions to the next level,” concludes Robles.
