BOCCA WIRED – Web developer 2009-2010
Summary
I built campaign sites for Movia and the Danish Heart Foundation, among them Overraskende hurtig, which took bronze at the Creative Circle Award.
Description
One of BOCCA's greatest strengths was the ability to tell stories. But back in 2009, the stories had moved over to the web. The solution to this was BOCCA // WIRED.
WIRED was a creative agency with a digital edge. In the two years they existed, they were a significant positive contributor to the BOCCA Group's financial result.
WIRED took home awards from the Creative Circle, the Danish Internet Awards, and the Webby Awards.
Overraskende hurtig
The campaign that ended up giving WIRED – and indirectly me – its first Creative Circle was ”Overraskende hurtig” (”Surprisingly fast”) for the Copenhagen transit authority Movia.
The task was to get more passengers onto the buses by making it tangible how far you could actually travel on the S-bus network. The campaign ran from late April 2009 across several weeks on outdoor, banners, bus wraps and a dedicated campaign site showing travel times and connections across the eight S-bus lines.
I was brought in by Mikkel Hyldenbrandt, Mikkel Würtz and Eskil Busck as an external Flash and PHP developer. Eskil and I had shared an office at Republikken, and we had already built the prelaunch site for L.O.C.’s Melankolia/XxxCouture together – so they knew what they were getting.
The campaign site was my part of the job. I built it together with a graphic designer and an art director – they handled the visual and conceptual side, I handled the development. It was awarded bronze in the Digital – Microsites category at the Creative Circle Award 2010 – a year when fewer than one in ten submitted works took any metal at all.
After only two years, WIRED was merged back into BOCCA Advertising Agency, driven by a wish to build a new agency with a stronger emphasis on owned media and digital campaigns.
In the meantime I had intensified my collaboration with a number of other agencies, among them BBDO, Verk and ContentCPH.
At the same time I was carrying a larger assignment for GN Netcom // Jabra, which I had taken over through EuroRSCG, and which demanded a good part of my time.
My tasks
From Photoshop to Flash
The workflow was the same every time: take the graphic elements, cut them up in Photoshop, import them into Flash and make the whole thing move. It sounds mechanical, but it is not – an art director draws what looks best, not what can be animated, and closing the gap between the two is what a Flash developer gets paid for.
The content lived in XML, not in the timeline
The S-bus campaign had to show eight bus lines, both directions, every single stop with its travel time and its connections to other lines. The standard Flash approach was to put all of that straight into the timeline. That would have meant hundreds of stops hard-coded into a file only someone with Flash installed could edit – and Movia revises its timetables twice a year.
So the content moved out of the movie and into XML. One schema per line, mirrored in both directions, where every stop was an element with a title, a travel time and a list of connections. The Flash file loaded those and built the display from them. The menu labels lived on their own, and the template for new lines sat as its own file, ready to be filled in.
The SEO was 2009 SEO
The price was visibility. A pure Flash site is a single file Google cannot read: no text, no links, no structure. All that tidy XML sat inside the player, where search engines never went.
The answer back then was meta tags – keywords in subject and dc.keywords, the list you wrote because that was how it was done. Google stopped listening to it soon after.
When HTML5 arrived the problem disappeared, and Flash went with it. It was a technology I spent years mastering that was dead five years later.
The days were long, but the culture was strong.
