A MAGICAL PROJECT FOR THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS

On the eve of the Christmas holidays, the Kinder brand decided to implement an unprecedented project designed to change the situation, namely - to return adults and children faith in the miracle.

The idea was to create a personal holiday greeting for your child that would be videotaped by none other than St. Nicholas himself.

Task

The project involved developing the mechanics of interacting with users on the website, processing input data, and creating and sending a personalized greeting for the child to the specified address.

The Cat Digital team was responsible for the IT component of the complex project, the site development and creation of a personalized greeting video. Mediahead, a full-service agency, was responsible for the overall idea and oversight of implementation.

Implementation

To allow parents to leave a greeting application, a website was created that took visitors through a few simple steps. At each of them, adults were asked to choose one of the suggested answers about their child's characteristics, namely: the greatest gains and achievements of the kid, his or her dreams and aspirations, favorite TM Kinder sweets, which the child would receive under the tree as a gift. Parents could also upload a photo of their children and choose to address their child in the normal or diminutive form (for example, “Andrew” or “Andy”).

The results of each step were sent to the system in the form of a unique identifier, which was responsible for adding the corresponding audio and video fragment to the video greeting.

All audio and video fragments were preconverted by the system to unify their parameters, such as bitrate and resolution. This made it possible to compile the fragments of different origins (tracks from postproduction, tracks from the recording studio and background music) into one continuous video with greetings by running a manually written script.

To log in to the website, a system of user authentication over the phone was used, which made it possible to send ready-made greetings to parents through one of the selected options (SMS, chat bot in Viber or Telegram).

In terms of web development technology, it is worth noting that for front-end work, the team used the Livewire framework designed to create dynamic interfaces. This allowed to switch between steps on the site without reloading pages. In the context of back-end development we worked with one of today's most popular frameworks - Laravel.

But the most important achievement was that the fairy tale was really believed!

And even 13-year-old eighth-graders were surprised and shared links to the greetings with each other wondering how it was that St. Nicholas knew their names and wishes. Even some of the adults took the opportunity to order a magical New Year's greeting for themselves and enjoy their childhood favorite TM Kinder sweets :)