Going Virtual: Facet Builds A Comprehensive Virtual Experience Platform for Experiential Agency
Going Virtual: Facet Builds A Comprehensive Virtual Experience Platform for Experiential Agency
SUMMARY
As the global pandemic in 2020 forced many organizations to rethink their communications and marketing strategies, the industry of experiential advertising was hid particularly hard with live events disappearing. Facet Interactive was approached to help transform and deliver world class virtual experiences to a leading experiential agency and their customers. Facet provided strategic, technical, and managerial support to develop a Virtual Event Platform with a fully-immersive 3D experience, contributing to the success of the experiential agency's transition to digital events.
Roles
Facet Interactive's team consisted of:
- Solutions Architect: who spearheaded the strategic development of the project.
- Multiple Drupal Developers: who led the creation, maintenance, and customization of the virtual experience platform.
- Technical Project Manager: responsible for overseeing project execution.
- Content Manager: overseeing content production for 3D virtual tours.
- Javascript Developer: providing necessary technical expertise to personalize the front-end experience in the 3D photo and video experience
CHALLENGE
The experiential agency was tasked with a transition to highly engaging, virtual experiences for their clients, promoting various sales events and training on both a global and national level. They faced challenges with the cumbersome process of refreshing the 3D environment and implementing callouts and highlights for the events.
INSIGHT
Facet Interactive leveraged Drupal 9, Pantheon hosting, and Cloudflare CDN to build an end-to-end 3D and 360° photo virtual tour experience for multiple global Fortune 100 companies. This allowed for a repeatable process to minimize custom development for each new virtual event, and ensured smooth delivery of virtual experiences during high traffic events.
Solution
The implemented solution comprised:
- Virtual Experience Platform Development: Drupal 9 was leveraged to build a virtual tour experience with an embedded 3D tour and interactive elements. Google Analytics integration provided individual attendee engagement tracking for event organizers, allowing event stakeholders to measure virtual exhibit engagement down to the media asset click and dwell time.
- Technical Sales Engineering Support: Facet’s solutions architects and engineers worked with the experiential agency’s account executive and creative team every step of the way through new virtual experience pitches — ensuring that technical strategy and requirements were de-risked and effectively communicated.
- On-Call Support: During major events, 24x7 support was provided to ensure a smooth event experience, monitoring for traffic spikes and reacting quickly to any performance degradation.
- VX Platform Configuration: A central Virtual Experience Platform (”VXP”) Drupal distribution was developed and forked for each customer's virtual experience. Updates and maintenance were efficiently managed through upstream Drupal distribution configurations on Pantheon.
- Pantheon Optimization and Authenticated CDN for Large Events: Facet brought the VXP to Pantheon to host and provide Drupal-tuned hosting infrastructure during large traffic virtual events. The Pantheon Advanced Global CDN was leveraged to allow for cache-optimized experiences to be delivered globally from the content delivery network, ensuring event global attendees had smooth experiences with the 3D virtual experiences delivered in 8k resolution.
- Compliance Consultation: Global compliance and regulations were scoped and delivered as per the end-customers' needs for each event across multiple continents and regulatory environments.
- WordPress Development Support: in addition to platform development Facet provided ad hoc marketing support for the experiential agency to drive lead generation and demand generation for bringing new customers to the platform.
