Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 20

Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 20 - Index

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Pull out your day planner, Blackberry,
PDA or whatever gadget you use to keep
your contact lists, go to the “G” section
and remove your entry for Oak Park,
Mich.-based post-production studio GTN.
But don’t delete the info. Copy and paste it
to the “R” section because as of September
1, GTN is now Ringside Creative.
The name change comes on the heels of the
August 31 sale of GTN’s asset management
and distribution business to DGFastChannel,
the nation’s leading provider of digital media
services to the advertising industry. The
sale, explains Doug Cheek, owner and CEO
of Ringside Creative, was prompted by a
desire to refocus the company’s energies on
its talent and services – and, of course, an
attractive offer from DGFastChannel.
“We had a business in our distribution
and asset management side that had matured
significantly and became of great interest and
value out in the marketplace,” says Cheek.
“DGFastChannel came along and we began to
have discussions about their desire to want to
continue to build their side of the equation.”
But why change the name? “Ringside has
built some significant brand equity over the
past couple of years,” says Cheek. “I took the
time to consider changing names or reinventing
the company. I took a look at the equity and
the reputation that [Ringside] had not only
here in Detroit, but around the country and
thought, ‘Well, why not just make it an additive
situation where we add more services under
that banner?’”
This, according to Steve Tocco, head of
business development at Ringside Creative,
simply means merging the creative offerings
of the two entities. “We still offer creative
editorial, telecine, motion design, visual effects,
CGI, audio, sound design and retouching,” he
says. “All of those services remain at the same
level they were in terms of resources and
capability.”
Even though the re-branding essentially
replaces a half-century-old institution with
the name of a relatively new creative editorial
company, Doug Cheek is confident that
Ringside has the clout to pull it off.
“The market has changed a lot, and a lot
of companies are now offering all of those
other services,” he says. “So we took a
look at that and said, ‘We’ve got a great
brand here with a lot of equity in it [that
is] perceived as creative and capable. The
other pieces that we put under the new
Ringside Creative banner have just made
it that much more robust.”
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