Interactive voting platforms
MTV’s Online Music Awards (the “OMAs”) was a digital celebration of online music and culture, and the intersections thereof. Like the music and technology industries it was inspired by, the awards celebration was both timely and ever-evolving. Happy Cog partnered with MTV/Viacom in a multi-year collaboration on vastly different OMA web experiences. Our collaboration allowed us to learn from our previous experiences, and build a stronger partnership driving truly spectacular results.
One of MTV’s business requirements in the bi-annual celebration was to increase user participation through category voting. Driving over 42 million user votes in 30 days (leading up to the voting deadline, the volume was over 5,000 votes per minute), our work on OMA 3 increased user voting by 21 million, compared to our work on OMA 2, and over a 4200% increase from OMA 1 (prior to Happy Cog’s partnership).
From category voting, to Guinness World Record-setting feats, to the Flaming Lips’ record-breaking performances viewed through the live show stream, our involvement in the crafting of the experience was multi-faceted—from strategic planning, to execution of the online experience, to live-monitoring during the events themselves.
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Brand, Design, Development, Strategy, and UX
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Arts & Culture
The yellow arrow on this page represents the nominees’ vote trending. During the voting period users noticing a downward trending arrow would take to Twitter and organize group voting, driving vote trending upward again.
Even though the site was cached behind a worldwide cache, we were able to sync up several hundred Instagram photos and over 10,000 tweets in near real time. This included scheduled sponsored tweets and award winner announcement tweets. This stage also featured a multi-camera option allowing users to explore across the event including behind the scenes in the event control booth, upcoming venues, and a live “fan cam.”
Video highlights were critical in OMA3. With a 24-hour celebration, users couldn’t watch the whole thing. Highlights were used to catch someone up, or allow them to decide what portions of the show they wanted to experience. Each highlight is tagged in a variety of ways enabling Facebook and Twitter sharing. For example, on Facebook users can actually play videos inline within their news feed, without jumping back to the site.
At the close of the event, while the Flaming Lips crashed to grab some sleep, Happy Cog switched the site to the post event state. This version of the site moved the focus back to the OMA blog, and to the content they produce throughout the year.