Project name: MTV OnDemand – Best Of
Category: Web Development, Rich Internet Application
Services: Concept, Graphic Design & Coding, Maintenance & Server Assistance
Client: MTV Italia
Technologies: HTML5, Sass, Jquery, Ruby + Rails, Mysql, Nokogiri
Link: http://ondemand.mtv.it/best-of

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

We have created MTV Best Of: the new section of MTV Ondemand – the MTV’s platform of video on demand (VOD) – where users can watch, vote and share the best brief video-clips, selected and “clipped” by MTV’s Editors from MTV television series and shows.

OBJECTIVES AND OPTIMIZATIONS

The main purpose of the section Best Of is to increase video views’ number, bringing new users to MTV Ondemand and augmenting existing users’ participation rates.

To achieve the objectives, we mixed four main ingredients:

1. SEO: all the code and the design are optimized for SEO. This is very important to effectively exploit the strong brand awareness and image of MTV Intellectual Properties (like Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, Awkward, The Valley, etc.); moreover, videoclip selection helps to use high traffic keywords (like “sex”) into tags, descriptions and titles
2. Gamification: to increase engagement, we added some easy gamification elements. First a basic voting system to allow users to decide the best videoclip inside a chart. Secondly, we created seven “Emotional Dynamic Charts”: users can describe every videoclip by selecting, among seven (Epic Fail; I can’t believe it; Really Trash; Infinite Laughs, I like it, This is awesome – cool, Epic Win), the feeling they think it suggests. Doing that, users create dynamic cross-shows charts, ordered by the number of votes expressed on that particular feeling. Finally, we limit the number of daily votes available to users: create “scarcity” to increase “value” is an important gamification strategy that helps in keeping users more engaged (e.g. if the user owns just one vote, that vote worth more and he will consider carefully how to use it) and the charts more meaningful.
   Besides the expected engagement reasons, we used gamification elements to: 1) having more interesting charts, able to represents users tastes and so to gain immediately the attention of new users; 2) incentivize Social Media shares
3. Social Media Integration: voting action requires to be registered to MTV Ondemand. MTV Ondemand’s registration process incentivizes a lot the use of Facebook Connect. All this is naturally important for CRM & segmentation strategies, but also allows us to use Facebook and Twitter to bring new users to MTV Best Of, incentivizing shares and likes.
4. Design: all the pages has been designed to continuously drive the users towards new contents. We used dynamic widgets that use backend setting, gamification data and automatic feed to always propose new videoclips and charts to users.

Besides Marketing purposes, MTV Best Of has been designed to not increase editorial costs. To achieve this goal, we connected Best Of’s CMS to MTV proprietary CMS, so editors can upload the videoclip as usually and Best Of configured platform does everything else.