NBA 'Faces' Banner Campaign
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, contacted us to help them with a video banner project for the NBA playoffs campaign called 'Faces', which featured synced slip screen video of NBA stars playing against each other and speaking in unison about the emotional impact of the playoffs.
What originally seemed to be a simple banner production ultimately became a highly complex project. We developed a dynamic solution to simplify what would have been a series of banner deployments over the course of 6 weeks into a single deployment that updated itself dynamically—saving our agency partner and the client a significant amount of time and effort.
After the banner's initial load, the secondary load pulls in the next game to be played via an XML feed supplied by NBA.com. The banner looks at that feed and dynamically loads the two player images and the video of the TV spot associated with that matchup. The spot plays automatically and users are then dropped to a screen where they can select another matchup to view.
The cutting edge feature of the project is that the banner also dynamically updates itself to reflect the series that are taking place. Thus, despite the different rounds of the playoffs, users are only presented with valid matchup options. Via a second XML file residing on the Pointroll back-end system, the appropriate assets are associated with every possible matchup combination over the 4 rounds of the playoffs and the banner determines which ones to show based on the live NBA XML feed.
This allows the banner to be accurate while some round two and round three games are going on concurrently and the player image for any given team has been switched. Through a highly flexible code base and a significant number of advanced features in the Pointroll back end system, we solved a rather complex situation.
