CHALLENGE: Carpe Canum Media produces and delivers CTV ads at breakneck speed. Juggling a variety of clients and projects, this dispersed team is tasked with organizing large quantities of high-resolution video files, graphics, and other assets, and disseminating them to remote editors. More than anything, traditional cloud solutions and shipping drives in the mail created constant versioning and sync issues when trying to meet tight deadlines.

WHY SUITE? On Suite, Carpe Canum collaborates in real-time with editors across the globe, using a centralized, cloud file system with file streaming to facilitate faster post production. Carpe Canum’s creatives can maintain instant access to working media assets from any location, helping the team hit demanding turnarounds.

KEY INSIGHTS:

• Lean in-house team supported by flexible network of remote freelancers
• Suite enables real-time file streaming—no syncing or downloading required
• Integrated workflow with Backblaze B2 and Axel AI streamlines media management
• Faster client reviews and editor handoffs from any location
• Easy onboarding on Suite gets footage to editors within minutes
• Suite replaces traditional solutions like Dropbox, local servers, and shipping drives
• Suite enables faster response to CTV trends and tight delivery windows

“Here’s the policy: You gotta use Suite if you want to work for us.”

— Scott Salik, Founder/Executive Producer, Carpe Canum Media

Streaming is changing how viewers consume television. Hundreds of channels, niche collections of classic movies, reality shows, cartoons, and even ambient programming, come standard with most Smart TVs. Then there’s the streaming services, Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and others, offering audiences one of the easiest ways to access content. Some plans are free, some cost a pretty penny, and some host ads—that’s what we’re talking about here.

Connected TV (CTV) video advertisements are a popular choice for serving up highly targeted, trackable campaigns. It’s fast-paced business for the video production & post production studios helping create the content, which is designed to. Scott Salik and Ryan Yurada know that better than most. These two help run the show at Carpe Canum Media, a creative agency built around brand engagement, storytelling, and CTV campaigns that can trace a user’s engagement from first-watch to purchase. Since 2008, the studio has helped brands of every size tap into the millions of eyeballs glued to their television screens, building and adapting content to maximize results.

Tapping into CTV Advertising

Most consumers simply connect their TV to internet, sign into their favorite apps or streaming services, and don’t think twice about it. For Salik and Yurada, though, the unique digital address associated with each household offers a bounty of information—a somewhat unsettling ability to track viewers’ on-screen actions, clicks, and interactions between devices. Utilizing this data to target CTV ads to the right people is the key to success.

“The amazing thing about CTV is that it allows any business to be on TV,” says Salik, founder and executive producer at Carpe Canum. “Historically, 500 advertisers held roughly 80% of all commercial space, and now anybody can get in on it. You can have a local company and advertise within five blocks of your business, directly to people who are likely to walk into your store. That creates an incredible opportunity for small- and medium-sized business."

Ensuring every ad returns the expected results, Carpe Canum generates various versions of every asset, and remains poised to make changes at a moment’s notice. Clients advertising on CTV often want to tap into viral moments, timely cultural happenings, or seasonal trends, and consequently request quick turnarounds and a variety of assets.

“We’ll get calls asking if we can get a campaign ready in less than two weeks, sometimes faster,” says Salik. “Everything is A-B tested, and we’re tracking all that data. We can target commercials specifically to an audience and also actions afterwards. With that digital address, we can map all of the devices in the house, and we can track all of the actions people take based on the commercial. Now that streaming happens on IP-based televisions, as technology develops, we’re starting to be able to even track phone calls generated from that CTV exposure, any increase in digital traffic, or increased foot traffic into a store. It’s becoming a bit scary… but it’s fascinating.”

To find success in CTV is also all about experimentation, says Yurada, director of media content at Carpe Canum. It’s the constant adaptation and wide range of projects that keep it interesting—and keep advertisers coming back for more. “It’s crazy to able to take such a granular approach and really pinpoint your marketing,” he says. “We see so many types of projects, from taking a social media ad and converting it for television, to taking smaller assets and adding new elements just to polish them up. Every day is different, there’s so much variety.”

Workflow Challenges

Carpe Canum Media is built around a limited small in-house crew creatives and producers, and the team often works remotely. Utilizing a roster of freelancers that scales depending on project goals and requirements, Carpe taps into the talent it needs while keeping a slim profile. Having a dispersed team, however, presents file sharing issues and challenges getting media into the hands of the people who need it to create. Whether pushing a set of final deliverables over the line, or quickly hopping on with a customer to fine-tune campaign assets, Carpe Canum struggled with media management at every step of the post production process.

“One of the biggest challenges was pushing all those giant files around,” says Salik. “We were copying media to drives and shipping them, hoping they would arrive on-time undamaged; or we were using Dropbox and hoping that remote editors could properly download everything. Ryan and I also both had physical servers. Overnight, the servers would try to sync, but it didn’t always work—it was such a pain, we wasted more time dealing with that than you can imagine. I also used to carry drives with me all the time—I couldn’t do my work without carrying drives with me everywhere.”

Finding Solutions on Suite

Introducing Suite’s cloud storage with file streaming provided Carpe Canum Media’s post production process the upgrade it needed. Now the team integrates Suite with Backblaze B2 storage and the media asset manager, Axel AI, to ingest, organize, and edit content on a rolling basis. Using these tools together, Salik and Yurada can effectively manage their assets and budget, connect with key players and clients, and ensure every project stays on-track.

“The ability to leverage these three products together has really helped us to work quicker, keep our costs down, and provide content on-time,” notes Salik. “When we have a big project, we’ll load everything first into our Backblaze B2 bucket and Axel AI will immediately catalog the data. We can share that database on Axel with our clients, who then decide which files they want to use for a project—at that point we’ll drag those assets into Suite where our editors can begin working from anywhere directly from the cloud-connected drive.”

“We’re able to review assets with the clients that much faster—we can instantly open up a sequence that was edited in a completely different location,” continues Yurada. “Now, when we get a project, we can pinpoint an editor anywhere in the world and lock them onto the work in just a few minutes; when they’re done, we can take those updated assets and do whatever else we need to do to polish them up—it’s so easy with Suite.”

Final Thoughts

Utilizing Suite as the central source of truth for working assets on fast-moving CTV advertising campaigns, Carpe Canum’s media workflow now ensures everyone's on the same page, opening the door for Salik and Yurada to hire the best talent for the job while keeping the entire team on-track. “It's fantastic,” says Salik. “We have an editor in Spain that we’ve worked with many times—before we would have to upload files to Dropbox and hope he could download them correctly. Now, it’s literally brainless to make it work. Suite has made our life easier—a lot easier.”

Apart from the performance that Suite offers, enabling a remote workflow that feels local, the team at Carpe Canum also chooses Suite for the team behind the product, knowing they'll be supported at every step.

“Really, it came down to the people,” notes Salik. “When other teams ask what we use for storage, we say Suite. It just works. It’s so benign, you don’t even notice it’s any different than working local. I’m not copying drives or duplicating files overnight like I used to; no one has to run to FedEx at the last minute. It’s a great product and it just works. Here’s the policy at Carpe Canum now: You gotta use Suite if you want to work for us.”

Finally, as highly targeted, trackable advertising campaigns on CTV open the door for a variety of new companies to reach prospective customers, Carpe Canum is simultaneously opening doors to seamless remote post production and the next-generation of video workflows. For teams that haven’t yet considered the benefits of Suite's cloud storage, Salik doesn’t mince words: “You’re living in the past… you’re dinosaurs,” he says. “I would never go back.”

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