An app that spells happy: For managers, movers and shakers alike.

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The phrase “software is eating the world” has never been more apt. AirTable has many uses and applications for businesses. But it can be tailored. It can do what many other apps I’ve tested do, and more. Cracking it open was not too hard, just a quick credential provision and no credit card necessary.

Before starting Air Table’s14 day demo I reviewed a highlight video showing how senior managers at Netflix, Time, and Atlantic Records employ the software to manage their marketing programs.

As a former web editor and product manager at AOL Music, my role was an extension of a major label record promotions team, where my job was taking artist content they’d supply and publishing it at AOLMusic.com.

AOL Music was a portal where a fan could interact with the artist and have a really rich fan experience on our site, so imagine using AirTable to track the video asset, the audio asset, the hi resolution album photos, the RSS streams that pulled relevant content about that artist including tour dates, and more. Since home page was such big real estate, we and given the historical manner in which radio music industry had always focused on popularity, not only pushing it on the listeners but also tracking success in Billboard, it was always a strategic who made it on to the top level pages. And if you’re the guy at Atlantic whose bonus depends on the KPI of getting that artist to be maximum exposed, you’re basically a digital project manager whose stakeholders are from across the matrix within your org and outside it.

And project managers are on the calendar just taking the project and helping move the media, packaging, shipping, promoting, selling. You have to know how to stay organized with these assets, to get these fundamentally disparate things like an artist and his audience, together. You’re baking a cake which you and your organization will capture maximum revenue. But how?

Resources and timelines. If you’re selling real estate, or making an artist today, AirTable is the right tool to help you manage this job. Because for whoever is doing this job, you need to assess inputs and outputs, A|B testing, and data from all your interactions. This isn’t that complicated when you have a Table. And you’ll know that you’ve won when you’re building databases that connect to one another in this system.

Upon completion of my review of the AirTable Sales film and my recalled assessment of the days at AOL Music, I spent a few hours demo-ing AirTable as if I was building my own company from scratch. I was intuitively familiar with its design templates which help a user jump start their work by listing virtually every industry and use case.

The company I’ve been working on is an independent media company. A comedy club is the JV Partner. We are going to improve its digital operation.

So I used AirTable to take my creative vision for starting the company and producing any new content and marketing. I embedded the whole company plan into AirTable. Everything from legal and marketing ideas to the images of an org chart, a cast lists, crew, outlines and shot lists.

It wouldn’t have been so easy to do this if AirTable didn’t contain a simple design that any one with a week’s worth of cloud-SaaS interaction experience could intuitively understand and start to figure out.

The AirTable also lets a creative project manager brainstorm and ultimately create timebound calendars for every branch of a large project implementation. Given the advanced and robust toolkit, it was possible for me, the primary individual running the project, to not only write stuff in my tables in the app, but also import my own content, build other connected charts/ sheets/ databases, organize virtual meetings, and assign tasks to a small team or pod.

After sketching the company, I showed my work to a colleague with her watching my screen on Zoom. We created Air Table credentials for her to work on the project and she caught the jist in no time.

Back to the use case of the record label Atlantic Records, an experienced manager can run operations for a whole department or team. Keeping organized is a cinch because assets and files like press kits, songs, videos, are all essential components of each artist/ project that need to be shipped to many different end users such as bloggers, publishers, radio, streaming platforms (Spotify, etc), critics, venues and fan emails and social.

As a major label, with hundreds of artists to promote each quarter, Air Table lets the manager design each project differently. You’re not sending the same artist release to all the same end users. AirTable gives the manager a little sandbox to play with and they can have at it with designing a system workflow. So if a campaign has 100 media and outlet partners, a collaborative partnership between Atlantic and Nike may exist for one artist, and Atlantic and Bose for another. A manager wants to have a lot of resources duplicated, but ultimately, they different external teams.

Now let’s talk about releasing on a site where they’re targeting the consumer with an ad campaign. On Facebook or Instagram, you buy the audience segment based on intersest, age, geolocation, and how many you are targeting. So if you want to hit every 25 year old in America, you with a big song, versus only ever 45 year old in Long Island, your artist release’s costs are going to vary.

Strategic tweaks for the campaign can give the manager the ability to actually hit the same % of interactivity with different audience size, given the populations. But his KPI and metrics can all be tracked by plugging data into AirTable, and again, referencing original plans versus actual expenditures. And so, customizable dashboards let him know that success was overall similarly effective and the optimization of the campaigns was on target.

I would love to show others how Air Table works and believe it to be the next killer app for the future of Everyone should try AirTable, for cloud based work and project management.