Tech Talk: Impact Partnership's BRIC-Link Fool-Proofing Kit

Many customers of ours who use BRIC-Link as a stationary, point-to-point codec call it “the little black box that works”. You plug it in, it hums along, you mostly use the web GUI to interact with it – after a year or two, you might even forget where the actual box is.

Using it for a remote, however, is not quite so simple. BRIC-Link requires a fair degree of set-up, and often requires an engineer’s expertise to put together correctly.

But E.C. Hamilton of Impact Partnership has managed to engineer a remote broadcasting kit (with BRIC-Link at the core), for individual use by investment advisors and analysts with little to no technical experience with radio equipment, that can be set up in a matter of minutes. And he says it works like a sweet dream.

Right? It’s true.

Impact Partnership is a distribution partner for fourteen leader US insurance and investment annuity companies. It’s their job to inform advisors and agents about financial products, and then, to help those advisors to reach and educate people who are looking to retire.

Impact Partnership’s radio marketing program gives advisors with no media experience the ability to host a fully produced radio show. The company will script, record, and edit the show, take care of media buying – all the advisors need to do is block off a time in their schedule to record.

In the past, advisors would go to local radio stations to use their equipment. However, this meant they would need to take additional time out of their days, and significantly hurt the program. E.C. Hamilton, Impact Partnership’s studio engineer, knew he needed a way to streamline the process.

“We needed a codec we could send out into the field – something that could easily connect to our partners that we already worked with and that we could engineer in such a way to cut out the facility,” said Hamilton. After searching, he found BRIC-Link.

While BRIC-Link provided the audio quality he needed, Hamilton quickly found that the financial advisors were having substantial difficulty wiring up the codec when they received it. “Our advisors are often halfway across the country”, he said, which posed an issue – he’d often spend cumulative hours providing technical support. “We needed a plug and play solution that they could set up themselves, with little intervention and limited possibility for error.”

After some shopping around, Hamilton worked with Pelican to customize a 9” x 11” x 10” case to hold the entire kit, molded to the equipment. Inside fits a BRIC-Link and a Makie 402 mixer, wired together with custom cabling. Additional cables are included – when a client receives the kit, all they need to do is remove the kit from the case, plug in the two color-coded RE-320s and Sony 7506s supplied, and plug the kit into an Ethernet port and into a power source.

Because users no longer need to solve an engineering puzzle before each broadcast, “this kit has saved days of time, both for our customers and for our engineers”, says Hamilton. Furthermore, it’s led to an increase in Impact Partnership’s business – since the introduction of the kit less than one year ago, Hamilton says they’ve gone from doing 15 shows per week to over 100 shows per week in over 50 markets, and radio now makes up close to 50% of their business.

For more information about BRIC-Link and its successor, the BRIC-Link II, visit our website or contact us here.

For more information about Impact Partnership, visit their website at http://impactpartner.com/.