VMA Gif Wall
The 2012 VMAs were considered one of MTV’s most successful, and social, live streams ever. One of its creative wins included ‘Gif It’, which enabled users to easily snap a gif from an MTV video, and share it via Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter.
I was responsible for building out the Gif Wall, which was used to display and share the best of the gifs.
House Of Style Collection
House of Style was a show on MTV that chronicled the fashion industry from 1989 to 2002 in 72 episodes. It’s coming back to MTV this fall, and the video archive was launched as a subsection of their style blog. It required custom dynamic sidebars, a new marquee, and its own categories and tags.
This was accomplished by creating several new taxonomies and custom post types, a custom template, and various widgets for the sidebars. Custom SEO, reporting and rewrites were also required for all related pages.
CMT Video Platform
Moving CMT onto the global video platform helped standardize the video experience cross-brand, while accommodating brand-specific requirements.
The video platform provides a premium viewing experience, and drives socialization, leading to more video streams. It also implements the new “lite” view, with a smaller page download, and better SEO value. Custom skinning and headers can also be injected on a playlist or video basis.
Viacom’s recommendations engine was also new to this instance of the platform, with a supplied feed being transformed into HTML and pulled in via AJAX.
Visual Schedule Builder
The Visual Schedule Builder website was built from scratch, using a design provided by the client. Since then, I have also provided support and implemented additional design updates.
MTVN SEO
This WordPress plugin is completely filter-based, and retains backwards compatibility with the postmeta values previously declared using the All in One SEO plugin. It is built to be site-agnostic, as it is replacing all uses of the AIOSEOP plugin. Site code has complete control over the title, description and keywords tags. In particular, it improves upon the old plugin by affording the ability to customize the aforementioned tags for all post types, taxonomies (custom and otherwise), and other html documents. SEO information can also be overridden in the admin for each taxonomy, as well as posts.
White Label Widgets
Viacom developed a highly configurable widget framework that could be quickly customized and deployed across brand sites, blogs, verticals and event pages.
This standard “white-label” widget could be branded and sponsored differently for each deployment, simply by adjusting a configuration XML file.
Not only did I support and implement these widgets across several brands and pages, I also built an “extended” version of the poll widget, with navigation and animation between multiple polls, with the option of an additional category view. It was designed using PureMVC and Flex.
MTVN Advertorials
Prior to the creation of this plugin, advertorials were file-based, and required a site publish each time new advertorial information was needed. This plugin was created to provide a producer-controlled method of publishing advertorial information. It provides complete backwards compatibility, and includes a migration script to add all the old advertorial information. Ad campaigns can be added, edited and deleted all via the admin, and then assigned to individual posts. Most recently, the ability was also added for custom ad targeting and reporting values.
VMA 2011 Winners Widget
The 2011 VMAs were the most successful tentpole event in MTV’s history. They broke numerous records including the following:
- Most Tweeted About Award Show – According to Twitter, they saw 10 million @MTV #VMA-related Tweets during the East Coast airing
- Most Tweets Sent in a Single Moment – Beyonce’s pregnancy reveal saw 8,868 tweets per second at 10:35 p.m. on Sunday.
- Most Social Tentpole – more than 20% of traffic the days of and after the Awards were driven by social networks.
As part of the All Access Live social media experience, I developed an AttracTV widget that displayed the winners as they were announced, and provided the ability to share the news on Facebook and Twitter.
Mobile Apps
The MTV and VH1 touch sites are optimized for the iPad’s unique UI and user behaviors, to create a rich, intimate experience that engages the user through direct touch and play.
I was tasked with creating the apps page for both MTV and VH1, with the ability for the marquee and carousels to swipe horizontally, and the content to scroll behind the header and marquee. Both landscape and portrait orientations were targeted.
VH1 Hubs
In 2011, I was the main developer for three different hubs on VH1, including music, shows and video. This was a full redesign with the goal of unifying the templates and user experience on VH1.
These pages implemented the new “lite” view, with the gain being a smaller page download, with better SEO value. Page composition is loaded with the initial page load, while redundant page level objects are inserted via javascript, supplied as standardized chunks of HTML.
