CASE STUDY / BRAND STRATEGY · ACCOUNT LEADERSHIP · PROCESS
Finding Profit in a Process Problem
How fixing a broken production timeline – not the creative – unlocked Sling TV's first profitable quarter.
CLIENT Sling TV (DISH Network)
ROLE Sole Account Manager / Project Manager
DISCIPLINES Account Leadership · Process Strategy · Retention Marketing · Channel Development
RESULT First profitable quarter in Sling TV's history
01 / The Challenge
Sling TV needed to hit profitability, and re-subscription was one of the biggest levers available to get there. But the team chasing that goal was working inside a production process that hadn't kept pace with what the business needed.
THE BUSINESS
Every major campaign – including Sling's flagship March Madness push – ran on a one-month production lead time.
THE TENSION
That timeline looked efficient on paper. In practice, it left no room for real spec-gathering, ideation, or forecasting. Campaigns went out fast, but they went out as the safest possible version of themselves – fewer channels, more revision cycles, less strategic thought behind each asset.
THE QUESTION
How do we improve retention and campaign performance without more budget or more people – by fixing what's actually constraining the team?
02 / The Insight
The team didn't have a creative problem. It had a timeline problem.
Digging into why campaigns underperformed and revisions kept piling up, the root cause wasn't the work itself – it was when the work started. A one-month window meant the team was always reacting, never planning. That compressed timeline was quietly capping which channels were even possible, since anything requiring lead time (print, OOH, coordinated email) got cut before it was ever considered.
WHAT IT MEANT Fixing the output required fixing the process first.
03 / The Strategy
Structural change, then channel expansion.
01 / Diagnosed the real bottleneck
Traced recurring revision cycles and channel limitations back to the one-month production window, not creative quality.
03 / Identified an overlooked channel
Email re-subscription outreach was underused despite being a low-cost, high-leverage lever the client wasn't systematically running.
02 / Sold a three-month lead time up the chain
To both the client and agency leadership, reframing it as a business case (fewer revisions, faster turnaround to vendors) rather than a creative-team preference.
04 / Built for self-sufficiency
Developed email and creative templates the client team could manage on their own going forward, rather than a one-off campaign fix.
04 / The Work
With a three-month runway instead of one, the March Madness campaign was rebuilt with proper spec-gathering and forecasting up front — and, for the first time, could support channels the old timeline never allowed: email, print, and out-of-home, in addition to the usual digital push.
In parallel, a dedicated email retention system went live: templated creative and workflows the client team could run themselves, targeting lapsed and expiring subscribers directly.
05 / My Role
I was the sole Account Manager / Project Manager on Sling TV, responsible for identifying the process constraint, building the business case to extend the production timeline, and getting buy-in from both client and agency leadership to change how the team worked. I also owned the email channel build-out, from pitching it as an opportunity through to handing off a system the client could run independently. Across my broader tenure on Dish Network / Sling TV, I led teams as large as 60 people spanning strategy, creative, media, and analytics.
06 / The Impact
First profitable quarter — in Sling TV's history
70% — expansion in digital ROI
2,000+ — lifecycle activations
~2x — the usual re-subscriber rate on the March Madness campaign, following the timeline change
2,000+ — new resubscribers within 3 months of the email channel launch
~6–7 months — from diagnosing the production bottleneck (Nov/Dec 2021) to a re-architected campaign going live (March 2022) to the profitable quarter that followed
The extended timeline didn't just improve one campaign — it changed what the team was capable of running at all, permanently unlocking channels that had been structurally off the table.
07 / The Takeaway
The lesson wasn't about creative execution. It was that the biggest constraint on a team's output is often invisible — buried in a process nobody's questioned — and that unlocking it can matter more than any single campaign idea.
NEXT CASE STUDY: Making the Case for a System, Not Just Four Campuses
Brand Strategy · Consumer Insights · Integrated Campaign