Adobe AIR Showcase

Brand Up

Innovative marketing agency delivers extensible Adobe® AIR™ application to clients and staff to facilitate easy, secure data transfer.

Marketing agencies today have to do more than write good leads. To fully serve clients in a digital world, firms like Brand Up must combine innovative technology with marketing services to drive measurable results for their clients. One "must-have" tool in today's successful agency is an easy-to-use, secure data transfer mechanism that facilitates effective communication and collaboration between agency and client -- enabling trusted entities to exchange data from point to point within clients' corporate IT governance policies.

Brand Up, LLC offers strategic and marketing services that drive loyalty and customer growth across media. With offices across the United States, Brand Up specializes in strategy, creative, customer interaction, media planning, direct marketing and interactive technology to offer end-to-end marketing solutions to its Fortune 500 and Global 2000 client list.

Chris Hughes, CTO at Brand Up, is championing the firm's new Adobe AIR desktop application that is solving the agency's critical business need to move and receive data between the agency and its clients in a secure, trusted and auditable environment. "Our Adobe AIR application quickly won over our clients' IT and marketing departments, where security and data protection issues are a top priority," says Hughes. The Adobe AIR application is easy to use, has a branded desktop presence, and provides project teams with granular control over access to sensitive customer data.

Pressed to Get the Job Done

Managers under pressure to finish projects have typically been challenged by cobbling together seemingly secure file transfer solutions. Previously, staff members might unwisely opt to try to password-protect a file or to Zip a file and then find a third-party component to secure it. None of the steps were very user friendly.

The company's new Adobe AIR application greatly improves the process. Now, instead of trying to password-protect an Excel file, for example, and attaching it to an email, or uploading files to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protected web pages, users can easily drag spreadsheets, CSV exports, customer databases or any file and drop them into the Adobe AIR application, automatically creating a secure file that is sent across the internet on a 256-bit SSL connection. Once the file is received an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) receipt is generated and sent back to the Adobe AIR application. Files are transmitted intact and authenticated on both sides in compliance with HIPAA, Data Protection and SOX regulations. "The multiple layers of encryption are fantastic—better than my bank or brokerage," says Robert Goodyear, co-founder of Brand Up and architect of their application built on Adobe AIR. "What's more interesting is that the Certified PDF Receipt proves that I've handled the data responsibly as a corporation or employee—something that's on all our minds these days as we hear about credit card numbers or sensitive customer data leaking out into the public from some unfortunate vendor-client incident."

Rapid, Extensible Development

The Adobe AIR application was built in Adobe Flex™ using ActionScript 3. "We do a lot of Flash development and Internet-based software here; this is our first move to the desktop. The only way we could do it is to leverage our understanding of ActionScript 3 and the power that it provides for the offline user," says Hughes. He adds that it is amazing to be able to encrypt files at the desktop level before they leave the corporate environment—a previously difficult task. "If I tried to write this application in C, it would take five times longer just to get it to work on Windows and then I'd have to do it for Macintosh. With Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, we're saving months of development time."