success story

Lifestyle media digital platform for powerhouse company

Our client, a powerhouse lifestyle media company, manages some of the world's most popular brands in cooking, travel, home & garden, and home improvement entertainment. They faced several challenges in catering to digital demands of customers.

As the companies viewership grew to 170 million each month, with companion websites designed to complement on-air programming with rich "second screen" experiences for consumers across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, our client decided to create a flexible digital platform capable of handling 2 million page views per hour. They wanted to also be able to engage users in social media communities, increase ad revenue opportunities, and lower overall cost of ownership. After a series of unsuccessful attempts, the client turned to Virtusa to build a digital engagement platform with rich user experience (UX) capabilities.

 

 

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The Challenge

The key business challenges faced by the client include:

  • Inability to leverage digital technologies and effectively cater to the huge number of customers across the globe
  • Inability to capitalize on new advertising growth opportunities due to global economic recovery, as it fueled the rise of a new, affluent middle class despite launching new channels to meet consumers' desire for the "good life" depicted in these shows
  • Need for consolidation and transformation of numerous homegrown web properties while continually building emerging brands. This meant reimagining UX, replatforming technologies to scale, and accommodating new stakeholders. Also building new social media and community functionality, while optimizing for mobile and moving site functionality to leverage the cloud
The Solution

Virtusa's Digital team helped execute an ambitious three-year digital strategy, transforming the company's core web properties into a unified "digital platform of engagement" that spanned web, mobile and social. They did so by:

  • Using Adobe Experience Manager and Amazon Web Services, we created an elastic solution architecture to deliver sub-second personalized content delivery with the ability to scale for 20x traffic growth
  • The company's entire social platform was built to encourage active user engagement, lowering barriers for site registration by using social media logins so it was easy to for users to comment, share, and participate in communities
  • We also performed detailed SEO audits, seamlessly migrated content from legacy systems, and helped implement meta data manager and site manager to optimize advertising management
The Solution
The Benefit

The new digital platform helped revolutionize the company's online presence, lowering its overall cost of ownership and maintenance with 99.98% uptime, while giving it the ability to launch new products to sell to the market and advertisers.User engagement soared.

  • During the first Thanksgiving holiday post transformation, the new platform handled more than 28 million page views-2 million per hour, 320,000 unique page views per hour, and topping out at 450,000 requests per second
  • Total number of visits increased by 31.6%, unique visits increased by 29.7%. Page views per site visit increased by 62%, while returning visits increased by 121%. And perhaps most impressive, revenue per user increased by 244%, from $0.53 to $2.04
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