The digital part of an award-winning commercial went from the first call to the finished product in less than 4 weeks.
The project was able to scale to 200.000 views per day and process hundreds of thousands of user-generated content without sacrificing speed and reliability.
Developers, strategists, and the editorial team worked simultaneously on the project without switching platforms or taking turns.
A race against time
Despite the ten-year experience of its founders and a couple of impressive works under its belt, Matter Supply Co. was still a relatively young agency when it was contacted by the the biggest sportswear brand in the world to take care of the digital part of a critical marketing campaign.
The agency immediately took the opportunity to work on such an exciting project, but quickly found itself facing some real challenges. The largest, according to co-founder Marc Ammann, was the limited time available: "The client asked us to launch the campaign within a month."
The idea was a user-centered experience, where the user could submit the "dreams" they would like to follow, and the platform would show a real-time live stream of everybody's dreams visualized as dots on the website. They needed to integrate a sign-in feature, work from the ground up on both front-end and back-end, and be ready to handle huge traffic spikes.
"All of this with four weeks of work in the budget from the first call with the client and only two developers readily available for the project," recalls Marc.
A faster stack
The Matter Supply team had evaluated a traditional stack for the project, but they were not sure they could achieve their goals in just four weeks. For this reason, they chose a JAMstack architecture, based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup. This type of stack offers a level of speed, security, and scalability with few equals, but they had to find the right CMS to give the green light.
We tried DatoCMS, and the team loved it; it felt good, it felt very nice, and our client has been super happy with it.
An agency-driven approach
"We needed something focused on the user experience, with user-friendliness in mind," says Marc Ammann.
They also searched for a CMS easily accessible for the clients when they update their content, and this is one of the reasons why Matter Supply chose DatoCMS. The story of DatoCMS, born as an internal product of an agency, not unlike Matter Supply, was also a deciding factor.
"This is what I wanted," adds Marc, "A CMS built by an agency because they know what my clients need."
Like Squarespace
One of the essential features for Matter Supply was the Modular Content. They can put content together quickly and iterate on it in a matter of minutes, helping the client's editorial team to feel at home.
"It's what all clients want: to have something that gets very close to Squarespace," says Marc.
The API-first nature of DatoCMS also helped the team to work simultaneously on the back-end and the front-end, to iterate on them, and collaborate with the brand's internal teams.
I think Modular Content is probably one of my favorite features. Being able to put together a piece of content that the client can see on one page and ‘hey, this gets very close to Squarespace.‘
A sound success
Matter Supply managed to deliver the project in less than four weeks, integrating all the services flawlessly. The Campaign was so successful that it won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Commercial," and the digital part reached millions of people worldwide without a hitch. Not only Matter Supply reached the goals, but they far exceeded them thanks to their ingenuity and a modern, flexible stack.