MGA Entertainment is one of the world’s leading, privately held toymakers, known for children’s favorites L.O.L Surprise! Little Tikes, and Miniverse. While recognized for its innovative products, behind the scenes, MGA manages marketing for dozens of brands across many countries and hundreds of retailers, creating thousands of marketing assets for new product launches every 90 days. From budgeting to task planning, to automating asset discovery, Airtable enables MGA to streamline and accelerate marketing operations.

The challenge: Removing obstacles to collaboration, planning, and visibility

In a fast-moving, dynamic global industry, the agile marketing team at MGA Entertainment prides itself on moving at lightspeed while staying true to the company’s brand in every product launch. Increasingly they found themselves slowed by the lack of a centralized system for collaboration, planning, and visibility. Brand teams struggled to align, track performance, and respond quickly to executive questions during critical campaign moments.

Staff structures shifted after a reorganization, making even basic coordination more challenging. Teams didn’t know who owned which brand or when campaigns were running. And then there was the “pink umbrella moment.” “We wanted the image of a pink umbrella for a brand’s packaging,” explains Ashlee Meese, vice president of franchise and integrated marketing at MGA. “We knew it existed – somewhere among 40,000 assets.” But finding it among mis- or untagged assets proved the proverbial search for a needle in the haystack.

Additionally, projects initiated by marketing clients often came through in creative briefs that were unstructured, posted through various communications channels, and contained the equivalent of seven or eight briefs’ worth of tasks. This made it difficult for project managers to identify, plan, and schedule various, separate tasks for brand teams.

To address these logistical challenges and better integrate and streamline marketing operations, Meese began exploring how the different brand teams were managing their workflows. A big advocate of Airtable, Meese was delighted to discover that the Miniverse team were Airtable power users, having built a “killer app” for budgeting and social calendars.

But Meese didn’t immediately mandate the use of Airtable across the organization. Instead, understanding that need drives use, she highlighted the success of the Miniverse team, inviting them to demonstrate how they used Airtable to improve operations. With this approach, Meese built interest and trust across other groups, opening the door to successful, widespread Airtable adoption.

The solution: Applying AI to streamline key marketing workflows

Meese partnered with Nicole Smith, senior director of creative services, to initiate the use of Airtable across the marketing organization. They began with a single, focused task: “We started small, using AI in Airtable to create a self-updating directory,” says Meese.

To familiarize employees with the Airtable platform, Meese and Smith asked them to build out their directory profiles, adding their photos and interests. “Everyone loves a good team directory,” says Meese. And this one hit the mark. It helped staff re-connect post-reorganization and quickly became a daily resource across marketing.

Next, working closely with an Airtable solutions architect, Meese and Smith expanded their use of the AI-powered platform to support creative intake workflows and campaign management. Later, Smith led a project to automate summarization of CMO briefing materials.

Using Airtable, Meese and Smith have completely streamlined four major creative services workflows for MCA marketing: First, the Airtable Omni feature takes unstructured creative briefs and breaks them down into separate, tagged tasks, helping project managers plan. Asset discovery is now automated, with AI agents in Airtable scanning creative briefs for SKU numbers and pulling relevant assets from MGA’s Box repository. If a brief contains no SKU, agents search the database for related products.

Image searches are a cinch now too; Omni searches for images based on metadata and objects within the image, reducing once-onerous, manual searches, like the one for the elusive pink umbrella, from hours to seconds. What’s more, Airtable automatically creates CMO briefing materials, curating input from brand teams into a single, executive-ready view to make leadership meetings more efficient and well-informed.