D&AD is a non-profit advertising and design association established in 1962 by a group of designers and art directors including the likes of David Bailey and Terence Donovan. D&AD exists today to stimulate, enable and award creative excellence in design and advertising with its membership representing creative, design and advertising communities worldwide.
Filter Digital were delighted to be appointed as the digital agency to produce D&AD’s content portal to support their Profressional Awards Festival.
The D&AD Professional Awards are recognised globally as the ultimate creative accolade, entered and attended by the best from around the world. Filter Digital were therefore delighted to be appointed as the digital agency to produce their content portal to support their 2017 Awards Festival.
The proposition was straightforward. The Award and Festival cycle generates high value content which has real relevance to the design and advertising communities. D&AD wanted to make this content readily available and to use it to gain further understanding of who was following the event.
The team at Filter Digital decided to build the platform on WordPress, making use of mature and feature-rich community plugins such WooMemberships, Beaver Builder and FlowFlow.
WordPress also allows the use of Filter Digital’s own themes and plugins. Utilising this platform enabled us to deliver on time, on budget and integrate the new property as a natural extension of D&AD’s existing digital estate.
Organising content was a significant piece of work. A clear and clean structure had to be developed to allow all the content to be tagged and categorised to make it easy to find, and to encourage engagement with related content and other upcoming events.
In addition, Filter provided D&AD with the tools they needed to quickly and easily publish content, including streaming video via Vimeo. This capability was essential to ensure that full value was obtained for the content generated by the Festival.
It was important to D&AD that all users could log in using their social accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Filter Digital therefor Implemented multiple authentication methods to decrease the barrier to sign in.
Integration with D&AD’s membership authentication service also allowed Single Sign On for organisation members with no need to maintain one more set of account credentials.
As part of the scope of the project, D&AD wanted to understand their membership better. By gaining insights through web analytics and demographic information from social profiles, they were able to identify the professional communities they serve.
As an example, industry professionals see the organisation as a career resource and this became more evident with the implementation of social login, something that makes it easy for individuals to align their personal social profiles with the organisation, rather than registering with their – often transient – work-related email addresses.
With less than a month to complete the work and a tight design brief this project had its set of challenges. The project however was delivered on time, on budget and on brief.
As a result of the project’s success, once the festival was closed, the decision was made to retain the content portal as a way of maintaining and deepening engagement with the organisation’s membership and its wider following.
The content portal became an integral part of the organisation’s strategy, supporting the New Blood Awards and the new D&AD Impact Awards.