Chrome extension 
The following is a conversation with Ezekiel Rudick, Creative Services Manager at Rosetta Stone, and Alex Bullington from MarkUp. Rosetta Stone is a Ceros customer and in our conversation, Ezekiel details the types of content he and his team are creating through Ceros, what their feedback process looked like before MarkUp, and how they’re leveraging the MarkUp platform today.
Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rosetta Stone is transforming how the world learns languages. Corporate, educational, and public-sector institutions, as well as everyday learners, have turned to Rosetta Stone since 1992. With offices in the United States, European Union, and a remote workforce around the globe, Rosetta Stone has a wholehearted passion for innovative, accessible language learning.
To kick things off, let’s start with this: how has Ceros been overall and why did Rosetta Stone go with Ceros for content creation?
Ezekiel: Our use case at Ceros is an interesting one because the Rosetta Stone creative team supports two sides of the business: the consumer side and the enterprise side. I oversee the creative team on the enterprise side of the business, essentially helping bring to market a product that is sold into massive organizations like Sony Pictures or Twitter or any large organization that needs language training for global workforces.
Rosetta Stone has been around for 28 years and with that, we still have some legacy systems in place. Long story short, with content needs always shifting, we needed our website’s homepage to update regularly, so one of the ways we leverage Ceros is to build and iterate on our homepage pretty consistently. Our overall lead quality with Ceros has also been really good, just having the ability to create more interactive content experiences.
Lastly, Rosetta Stone typically has these assessments for users that last about 45 minutes or so. We wanted to create something faster for potential new users as a lead gen source, so we used Ceros to build a micro version of that assessment which is about 10 minutes. We’ve been able to do a lot of cool, experimental, creative projects with Ceros. It’s been a lot of fun.
What was your content review process like before MarkUp?
Ezekiel: Lots of passing around of PDFs. You’d send out a page at a time. People would make comments and send them back in an email. A lot of old school methods for reviewing creative projects. We were actually looking into a platform we could use where we could make a PDF more collaborative and MarkUp came along at a pretty serendipitous time. We were at a place where we needed to speed up review processes and nothing speeds up a review process like being able to review content in real-time. Just being able to upload a link and bounce comments back and forth was fantastic. Onboarding was instantaneous which is something I look for in a good product. You click on your content, someone leaves a comment, someone responds to it. It’s super intuitive.
What types of content have you been reviewing inside of MarkUp?
Ezekiel: The reason we adopted Ceros in the first place was because we wanted to create more interactive content and we wanted to shy away from traditional lead gen approaches around customers having to download a PDF. So it’s mostly been lead gen content and we really wanted to cut down on review time to push that content through the iteration process faster.
Who are the main users for Rosetta Stone inside of MarkUp?
Ezekiel: My direct team on the creative side is three total people but our project stakeholders are a global team of marketing managers that oversee certain regions: US, UK, Germany, APAC, and a few others. We have managers from those regions coming into MarkUp to review content.
What would you say is the biggest benefit your team gets from MarkUp?
Ezekiel: It’s honestly most useful for our creative team review. It allows us to move a lot quicker through the iteration process. So I can leave feedback and get the updated version back in MarkUp in a matter of minutes. It’s allowed us to move much faster, especially now that we have so much content to produce. We’ll use it for anything now – the other day I had one of the designers throw together a LinkedIn ad quickly and we just uploaded the image into MarkUp for feedback. We went through a quick round of comments and then the ad was launched. We’re just using it for all sorts of things.
Do you have any product recommendations moving forward?
Ezekiel: I was going to say you need a Chrome Extension but… [he laughs], you guys are on it. I would say just to be able to tag team members will be really good. I also noticed that notifications have gotten a lot better as well. But yeah overall we’re just stoked to be able to use the product as it is.
This is the fifth story in MarkUp’s Case Study Series. Check out our previous conversations with Getty Images, Stream Realty, Guru, and PTC.
For more information on Rosetta Stone, visit www.rosettastone.com, and learn more about how the company is taking on both the consumer and enterprise sides of learning and adopting new languages in life and business.
