Onemedia programs online Advent calendar for Microsoft

In mid November, we received a project assignment from our agency partner Threeview with an extremely tight deadline. The project was for Microsoft Germany who wished to express its gratitude to distributors and particularly to their employees for their excellent performance in 2011. Microsoft's treat was an online Advent calendar with an embedded quiz and many premium prizes. The nature of the Advent calendar meant a hard and fast deadline of November 30.

 

Each distributor company was to receive its own calendar application. While the functionality was to remain the same for all recipients, user information and reports needed to be handled separately for each company. Regarding the application layout and mailings, distributors would be permitted to add company-specific elements such as their logo or address.

 

We created one comprehensive application for all distributors as well as sub-domains for company-specific data. The public part of the solution includes a landing page with information about the Advent calendar and a small download portal as well as double-opt-in registration with email confirmation, a feature to reset forgotten passwords and login reminders. When distributor employees log on, they see the Advent calendar view. On each business day in December, the top performers on a task from the previous day are allowed to open one door. Behind this door, they will find the quiz question of the day. If answered correctly, the user automatically enters an evening lottery. The winner is selected automatically.

 

Each distributor has administrators who are in charge of unlocking the calendar doors. A designated area shows a complete overview of all participants and Advent calendar days. For each day and participant, special icons indicate if the user is allowed to open a door or not, if he/she gave the correct or wrong answer and if he/she won the lottery. Distributors assigned as super administrators are additionally able to access dynamically generated Excel reports on activities in the download portal as well a detailed calendar status report.

 

The application was developed using the Symfony2 PHP framework, a MySQL database and the jQuery JavaScript library. It runs on a high-performance Ubuntu LAMP stack.

 

Project management, design, winner notification and the procurement and shipping of the prizes was taken care of by our partner Threeview.