Emerge Interactive

For this year's game, Kraft and their partners at Razorfish (New York) decided to launch a Facebook Application promoting Ritz Crackers-Ritz Battle of the Toppings.

The application's centerpiece was a sweepstakes to win $50,000. Contestants could increase their chances by inviting their friends and by sharing content unique to the application, including videos and an interactive game.

As technical development partner, Emerge delivered the full digital implementation for the Application using PHP, including a custom CMS, integration with the sweepstakes engine from Promotions.com and the game.

The application logged over 20,000 users in less than one month, who shared Ritz-branded content over 10,000 times. As far as which team will emerge victorious, you'll just have to log on and see for yourself!

AXE is a consumer brand best known for its ads and products geared towards young men, but in January, parent company Unilever took a new direction by creating its first fragrance for both men and women, AXE Anarchy. Emerge collaborated in a global campaign to promote the new product line, spearheaded by Razorfish (New York) and BBH (London), to create a high-end, custom YouTube channel application.

The concept was to create a social-media driven, user-generated graphic novel (developed by the expert team at Aspen Comics), created in real-time as actual users interact with the story and suggest how it should develop, provide plot ideas, vote to choose upcoming characters, interact with each other and more.

As technical development partner, Emerge delivered the full digital implementation for the graphic novel, including a custom interactive reader, social-media integration, Content Management System, and scalable cloud hosting solution. We built the application using Ruby on Rails, and host it using both Heroku and Amazon EC2 servers with the ability to scale to handle millions of visitors a day.

Flying Like the Pros specializes in producing sophisticated, entertaining, and engaging educational materials for General Aviation pilots by drawing on the experiences and insights of professional pilots. Their goal was to create a website that delivered a market-changing level of quality in general aviation education, revolutionize the flight-training marketplace for general aviation, and in so doing attract and sustain a dedicated online community of pilots.

To achieve this, they turned to Emerge Interactive and our partners at Hot Studio. An extensive discovery and strategic process, combined with technical analysis, platform evaluation and feature prioritization resulted in a site that is in a class by itself in the world of general aviation sites.

The site includes a robust e-commerce implementation, selling subscriptions to high-quality video-based courses, with or without a physical DVD product. "Ask the Pros" enables pilots to ask questions of professional pilots, and "WingTips" provides free tips and tricks from professional pilots. An inviting, intuitive user-interface on the front-end is supported by a scalable, open-source architecture built upon Drupal and hosted using Amazon Web Services cloud hosting, ensuring that the site can seamlessly scale to meet demand. To support the large number of pilots who use the iPad, the site was also optimized for that platform, including HTML5 video delivery.

Care2Tri is a unique and amazing organization that unites two great causes: personal fitness and improving the lives of individuals with disabilities. Founded in 2010 by Greg Simony, Care2Tri brings together triathalon athletes with participants with disabilities, pushing, towing and otherwise bringing them along for both training and races. They promote the inclusion of individuals with disabilities, especially Cerebral Palsy, to provide them with opportunities that they may not otherwise have.

Since the focus of the site is frequent updates from Greg and other athletes, Emerge built the site in WordPress to enable volunteers to quickly and easily make changes and updates to the site's content.

Emerge donated all work in the form of an in-kind contribution to the Care2Tri, as a part of our ongoing commitment to support important social causes.

You've sponsored the Grammy Awards and now you want rich media as dynamic as the show itself. Leading up to and after the big show you have several distinct campaign phases, each with it's own unique creative treatments, but you don't want to retraffic a whole slew of banners each time- it would be great if the campaign could automatically change on, say, Sunday morning. As ever, k-weight is tight and there's a lot of awesomeness to squeeze in. Oh, and we only have six weeks. Possible? Envelope please...

You bet it is. Thanks to time-based content when the show started on the east coast viewers there saw banners announcing the big moment had finally begun, while viewers anxiously waiting on the West coast continued to experience media counting down with them. Working with Google DoubleClick's Rich Media Dynamic Ad (RMDA) platform we created rich units that a pizza-fueled Wieden + Kennedy team could change up on the fly while watching the show—if a giant eagle had swooped in to carry away Lady Gaga's egg, it would have showed up in banner within minutes. All executed in a remarkably tight turnaround.

Originally founded by Will Vinton, The Portland Creative Conference (aka Cre8con) is an interdisciplinary exploration and celebration of the creative process across various creative industries. The conference features keynote presentations from leading creatives who reveal their work and talk about their process, secrets, influences and inspirations.

Emerge used jQuery mobile to create a vibrant and useful mobile site to provide conference attendees with the real-time information they need during event, including schedule and event info, speaker bios, a map with nearby restaurants and the event's Twitter feed.

For this campaign by our partners at Wieden+Kennedy, Emerge created a number of Rich Media ads featuring eight different football players on motorcycles. Clicking a player displayed their "driver's license" with more information about them. The ads were served on the PointRoll platform to sites that included Stack Media, HighSchoolSports.net and Takkle.com.

How better to engage Lacrosse fans than offering them the chance to explore Max Seibald's amazing talent an immersive 3D experience? We can't think of anything better than Nike's "Max's Moments," designed specifically for Inside Lacrosse and Nike's Lacrosse Facebook page. In addition to building out the experience for Wieden + Kennedy, we worked with the amazing team at Razorfish and Google DoubleClick to take the unusual approach of delivering the experience to Inside Lacrosse as rich media, enabling the full benefit of DoubleClick metrics, tracking, and serving. The project is a standout example of awesome and is currently featured on the front page of DoubleClick's gallery of amazing rich media.

Emerge had the pleasure of supporting the inaugural TEDxPortland event by partnering with Wieden+Kennedy and Second Story to develop a desktop and mobile website targeted at attendees of the celebratory after-party on W+K's rooftop deck overlooking Portland.

The project's goal was to connect attendees and digitally augment their networking via a real-time social question and answer game. Attendees not only had fun answering questions that ranged from serious to silly, they were also able to connect in real-time with other attendees via their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, using a real-time relationship score that indicated how similar they were to other individuals at the party.

The game was a big hit, with players still answering questions through the mobile site days after the event and using it to connect with other party VIPs.

This year the fabled Sims™ game franchise made headlines by expanding virtual living to game consoles for the first time in its nearly twenty year history. Game maker EA and Wieden + Kennedy chose Emerge to help spread the word through a massive global impression media buy that enticed Sims lovers to "Simify" themselves and see their virtual antics splashed across the front page of the Tabloids. Not only did we face significant technical and scalability challenges with a project of this scale, we also had less than 6 weeks to pull it off.

We first determined how best to convert an uploaded image and render it out into an image of a tabloid newspaper as a truly Sims-like character. The result is a  "Simmification" engine that takes user images from a webcam or upload and converts them into "Simmified" tabloid headlines on the fly across all platforms. From there we extended the campaign to include standard and rich banner units, a microsite, as well as a "Make Headlines" tab on the Sims Facebook page. Given the challenges of supporting the massive fluctuations in traffic inherent in such a large ad push as well as the heavy load of processing the images in real-time we chose to host the campaign in the Amazon AS3 cloud solution, a first for both Emerge and Wieden + Kennedy. So far the results speak for themselves.

Game giant Electronic Arts (EA) developed a free downloadable game called Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm as a parody of a certain other game developer's often mocked military shooter series, to promote their own upcoming, er, military shooter game, Bulletstorm. When our partners Weiden + Kennedy came to us to develop and support the microsite for this viral campaign, we knew, at 700 MB per download, the site had to be robust and scalable in terms that few sites need to even consider.

Utilizing Amazon's EC2 and CloudFront to provide near instantaneous ramp-up of both processing power and bandwidth proved to be an excellent decision. In the first three days, users downloaded over 91 terabytes (yes, that's with a "T"), and to date a total of nearly 200 terabytes have been downloaded without a hitch. The flexible structure of the cloud hosting solution means that EA only pays for what it needs, when it needs it, rather than being saddled with the costs of supporting a huge viral hit long after the bulk of the buzz has faded. The site's performance easily earned the rank of (quoting one of the game's mocking send ups) "Sergeant Of The Master Sergeant's Most Important Person Of Extreme Sergeants To The Max!" Sir, yes SIR!

Nexidia provides customer interaction analytics solutions that enable companies to capture and interpret the full range of communications they have with customers. Nexidia provides software and services to help companies synthesize data from contact centers, email, chats, and even social media interactions into actionable insights for both operational improvements business transformation.

A long-time client of Emerge Interactive, Nexidia needed to update their website to better address the changing needs of their different audiences. Together, we began a phased upgrade to their site, which not only addressed their current needs, but laid a new and improved foundation for meeting their changing needs tomorrow.

Nexidia's business had grown to serve four very distinct markets, and they needed their site to better meet the needs of these different audiences. Since their site was already managed using WebActive^TM (Emerge's own Enterprise-class content management system), a key step was to upgrade their site to WebActive's Multi-Site Awareness feature, which would enable each audience to have it's own "site within a site," still managed through a single CMS. This enabled each site to be more flexibly tailored to the unique needs of its audience, and it allowed Nexidia to roll out the new visual design and navigation improvements to one audience at a time, significantly shortening the time to market.

Their primary market of Customer Interaction Analytics/Contact Centers was launched first, featuring a completely new visual design as well as a large amount new content. The site serving the Media and Entertainment market is the next to be redesigned, followed by the sites focused on Legal and Government applications for their products and services.

Few businesses (expect possibly interactive agencies...) rely upon the strength of their portfolio as much as architecture firms. Emerge knew only a visually rich, image intensive solution would meet the needs of health-care focused Jon R. Jurgens & Associates. So that's exactly what we delivered.

Emerge's WebActive^TM Enterprise-class content management system enables JR&J to keep the site up to date with their latest work, and highly efficient imaging technology allows the use of many, large images while maintaining performance and accessibility.

In partnership with visual design partner Whalen Louis, Emerge developed tandem desktop and mobile sites which included custom JavaScript components to bring MotiveQuest's unique approach to analyzing customer motivation to life.

If you want a challenge, try making a cutting-edge website that communicates the spirit, energy and vision of a cutting-edge company. If you really want a challenge, try doing that for an interactive design firm. But a new site for our long-term partners and industry-leading experience crafters Hot Studio? Now you've got an Emerge-worthy challenge!

As the CEO and Founder of HotStudio, Maria Giudice, said herself:

If you think it's hard to get everyone in your company aligned around something as supposedly simple as the choice of a single word or a color palette, imagine being one of a team of 10 designers, producers, and technologists who had to satisfy one another... and the other 40 brilliant and opinionated people who work at Hot Studio! Let me tell you, it was not an easy task.

Well, Maria, if it was easy, anybody could do it!

Push the envelope, then push some more. Stretch the flexibility of the Content Management System, across multiple content types, contributors and audiences. Take the notion of a fluid layout to new extremes, all while maintaining pixel-perfect accuracy and a seamless, intuitive user experience. Oh, and since HotStudio has been leading the way in designing tablet experiences, make sure it excels on the iPad.

You know what it's like when everyone *thinks* they're an expert. Well, when Hot Studio is your client, everyone IS an expert. But instead of "too many cooks," the result instead speaks to the dedication, smarts and talent of an extremely productive partnership. Cheers!

AltaMed is a large, multifaceted healtchcare provider based in Southern California. After hiring Landkamer Partners of San Francisco to perform comprehensive brand analysis and re-branding, it was clear that creating an industry-leading website was integral to their success. Landkamer then partnered with Emerge Interactive to help them determine the most effective strategy to achieve their objectives and then execute that strategy, creating a site that brings Altamed's online presence and customer services to a whole new level.

AltaMed needed to be able to offer as much content as possible in Spanish, while still maintaining a consistent structure, visual design and content management process across both languages. The SiteAwareness^TM feature of Emerge's webactive^TM Enterprise-class Content Management System enabled the creation and management of parallel sites for English and Spanish (as well as other languages down the road) which share site architecture, assets, functionality, design as well as a common interface for content managers.

Another key feature enables clients to search AltaMed's database of healthcare providers. Emerge worked closely with the AltaMed IT staff to integrate with their existing infrastructure, providing an easy-to-use interface to the information clients need, managed with AltaMed's existing tools and workflow.

A customer-focused information architecture was developed to provided differentiated content and clear navigation for AltaMed's different contistiuents. Emerge also performed a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization analysis, examining competitors, ranking keywords, and making recommendations to maximize both organic and paid search performance in the highly competitive healthcare market.

URI is a nonprofit peace-building and interfaith organization dedicated to promoting enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, and works around world to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing. Emerge was pleased to provide a substantial portion of their work to URI in the form of an in-kind donation as a part of Emerge's ongoing effort to support non-profit organizations which help others and make our world a better place.

The solution that Emerge developed with Hot Studio was to empower URI members around the world to become content creators, decentralizing as much of the website as possible. Each of the 470+ Cooperation Circles around the world has a page on the new website, and can share their activities through blogging, online forums and events.

WebActive provides the ability to the YMCA-SF to create and manage multiple micro-sites. This innovative feature allows individual branches to control and update the content of their own sites, while news, events and other content assets can be seamlessly shared between all the branches and the headquarters home site.

Challenge

• Provide consumers with up-to-date product information along with more and better reasons to come back.
• Give vendors the ability to update store information as well as download print-quality product imagery.
• Connect new website visitors to client's existing CRM systems.

Solution
Emerge collaborated closely with Santa Cruz Organic to design and build a solution that included:

• Comprehensive interactive strategy to meet the needs of the brands and their audiences. In-depth Information Architecture to create a fun and inviting user experience.
• Detailed Business and Technical Requirements which defined new features and functionality, including personalized, printable coupons, robust product and recipe management and extensive partner features, all integrated with existing SQB customer and data-management systems.
• Best-practice driven execution, including a full-featured and highly customized content management system.

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and wife Pam established Omidyar Network based on their conviction that every person has the power to make a difference.

Together with our partner Hot Studio, who designed the company's new visual identity, Emerge Interactive developed Omidyar Network's new website using the Drupal Content Management System.

Challenge

• Provide consumers with up-to-date product information along with more and better reasons to come back.
• Give vendors the ability to update store information as well as download print-quality product imagery.
• Connect new website visitors to client's existing CRM systems.

Solution
Emerge collaborated closely with R.W. Knudsen to design and build a solution that included:

• Comprehensive interactive strategy to meet the needs of the brands and their audiences. In-depth Information Architecture to create a fun and inviting user experience.
• Detailed Business and Technical Requirements which defined new features and functionality, including personalized, printable coupons, robust product and recipe management and extensive partner features, all integrated with existing SQB customer and data-management systems.
• Best-practice driven execution, including a full-featured and highly customized content management system.

The National Head Start Association is a private non-profit organization dedicated to meeting the needs of Head Start children and their families. Emerge worked with NHSA and Wieden+Kennedy to fully outline what the organization wanted to accomplish with their website and how to best deliver the services their audiences needed. Our solution included:

• In-depth discovery and audience analysis which drove development of a user-centered Information Architecture to intuitively deliver appropriate functionality and content to each audience.
• An Enterprise-class Content Management System with multiple custom tools.
• CMS-driven site features including News, Events and Legislative updates, a nationwide jobs board, fully-featured online donations capability utilizing Payflow Pro and complete integration with their existing member-management system.
• Best-in-class development practices during implementation with comprehensive training and support to NHSA staff and volunteers.

Oregon's Wild Harvest produces certified organic herbal supplements on their biodynamic farm in the foothills of Mt. Hood. Emerge Interactive designed and developed their new online presence that reflects their passion for producing high quality products.

The new website uses Emerge's WebActive CMS to allow OWH's staff to easily maintain their extensive catalog of products and online database of retailers that allows visitors to find a store close to them.

Twin City Painting provides exterior painting services in the Pacific Northwest. They needed their new website presence to reflect their high-end environmentally friendly painting practices.

Emerge Interactive provided strategic consulting, including an extensive search engine optimization strategy, design and implementation.

Working side-by-side with Debbie Thomas Real Estate Emerge Interactive's efforts was focused on capitalizing and supporting other sales media and marketing efforts to achieve the impressive business goal. Putting its interactive expertise to use, Emerge provided these potential buyers with a sense of urgency and mystique, as well as built the impression that they already have, at their fingertips, what they need to make an informed purchase-regardless of the fact they've never stepped foot inside the unit.

The Interactive Floor Planner was the key to providing the excitement-generating experience. Using scaled floor plans of each unit, this Flash-based tool allows users to select specific furniture, choose its color, and arrange it with 360 degree mobility anywhere they see fit. The tool allows owners to realize and find joy in one of the more fun aspects of playing house: laying out the furniture. Ultimately, it proved to be a key driver in the decision to buy.

UPLOGpro provides car dealerships with a revolutionary online lead tracking application. The challenge was to provide dealerships with a lightning fast and easy-to-use online application that would replace their internal whiteboards and paper logs.

Emerge Interactive worked closely with UPLOGpro to develop the application's project requirements, user interface, and web-application implementation. The resulting custom application takes advantage of the latest advances in AJAX technology to provide users with a seamless experience.

Working with Defteling Design, Emerge worked closely with The University of Oregon's Annual Giving Program to create their new website, which provides a broad spectrum of information and services to meet the needs of its equally broad audience.

Information is tailored for all different types of donors, from Alumni and Parents to Faculty, Current Students and the University's most generous supporters, President's Associates, who access special content through their own password-protected area of the site.

The website is driven by Emerge Interactive's content management system which provides a foundation for long-term growth and sustainability. This system allows the Annual Giving staff to seamlessly manage the website content and the numerous funds, as well as bloggers, DuckStories and more.

Emerge Interactive collaborated with The Green Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy to build a micro site that provides a collaboration space for members of the two organizations.

Together the two organizations are working to support a variety of activities, which aim to assist data center facilities in initiating and implementing an energy management program, to adopt clean energy and efficiency technologies and to achieve continual efficiency improvements.

The resulting micro site is built using Emerge Interactive's WebActive CMS, which allows administrators to easily maintain website content and moderate the collaboration suite.

Challenge
With such a vast database of whitepapers and case studies, Itanium Solutions Alliance needed a web solution that accommodated for easy access, to these valuable resources, by enterprise IT decision makers around the world.

Solution
Empire was tasked with implementing this CMS system to manage the above resources through a rich user-centered experience. Through a collaborative effort with partners and the Itanium Solutions Alliance, Empire was able to bring an unmatched level of customization to accomplish each goal.

Working with Wieden+Kennedy and Starbucks, Emerge Interactive developed a microsite to raise awareness and participation in the "Let's Clean Up Our Schools Day" community events. The website solution includes content management, event registration, and roster management.

The Solution
We connected the entire bookstore to their file maker database, and added advanced search resource tools that made finding desired titles very user friendly. We also added a custom ecommerce solution that streamlined the checkout process.

Over the last year, their organic web traffic and online orders have grown over 100%. This was mainly due to the extensive search engine optimization that was done to the site, as well as the rich user-centered functionality and design features

The Interactive Floor Planner was the key to providing the excitement-generating experience. Using scaled floor plans of each unit, this Flash-based tool allows users to select specific furniture, choose its color, and arrange it with 360 degree mobility anywhere they see fit. The tool allows owners to realize and find joy in one of the more fun aspects of playing house: laying out the furniture. Ultimately, it proved to be a key driver in the decision to buy.

The website is driven by Emerge Interactive's webactive content management system, which provides a foundation for limitless possibilities. This system allows Goosey Press staff to seamlessly manage the website content and e-commerce store. Emerge used the latest advances in DHTML, JavaScript, and Flash to provide a rich and inviting visitor experience.