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Interactive Annual 14:
DoubleClick: ThreeQuestions
“Incredibly clean and usable without sacrificing personality.” —Michael Lebowitz
“Interviewing business bigwigs online is nothing new. What is new is making the content relevant, more easily scanned and categorized—basically, giving users speedy access to what they care about.” —Toria Emery
In 1996, DoubleClick pioneered third-party ad serving. After more than ten years of exponential growth, the company wanted to demonstrate that it’s still the industry frontrunner. This simple, streamlined, interactive, interview series aligns the company with other industry innovators, while reminding visitors that DoubleClick is the leader. It’s not the seamless video that makes the site such a success, but the interview questions, keywords and supplemental content that provide the context for each speaker’s thoughts, making it all unfailingly easy to follow and comprehend.
- The site launched with three video interviews and now includes eight, with continued room to expand.
- The file structure is a mere two levels and each new interview adds only four videos, one small video for the nav, three images and two xml ?les to drive content.
How did time constraints affect your final solution?
“In many ways the entire project was born of a time constraint. The client initially requested a redesign of DoubleClick.com to unveil at the ad:tech conference. We knew we didn’t have enough time to develop the experience we envisioned, before the huge industry event. Instead, we proposed a microsite that not only featured innovators talking about the industry, but that was itself an innovative experience and would encapsulate their recent ‘nerve center of digital marketing’ position.”
Did you learn anything new during the process?
“Everyone’s using video now, but the rich video features we included on this site truly set it apart. We’d done a number of video projects in the past, but this was the first time we chaptered video components through Flash and gave the user complete control over the experience. During it, we learned some vital lessons about shooting and editing video, as well as optimizing it for the Web. In fact, the project paved the way for several subsequent interactive video projects in our office. What’s really cool is that even though we produced a handful of videos to get the site rolling, we also developed a style guide and an intuitive file structure so that DoubleClick’s in-house team could add to and maintain the site. Because of this system, they’ve been making updates, adding several new clips since the site launched.”
Ginny Golden, art director
Suellen Schlievert, writer
Justin Miller, lead designer
Dave Prukop, Flash programmer
Laura Breines, project manager
Third Story Films, digital video producer
Rick Fulgencio, quality assurance
AKQA (Washington, DC), project design and development
Lynn Tornabene, DoubleClick/Carrie Beth Wood, DoubleClick, clients
