Photo by Kristian Johansson.

Fascinating article from Fortune on Nike’s new marketing mojo.

Key takeaways? Let’s put it like this. In a discussion on meaningful brands, Michel A. Jansen once said that “the right to exist” is only granted when a company continuously adds value for its customers.

Over 200 million people have given Nike that right to exist. The sports brand understands the cardinal rule to survival in this cluttered, digital era: make connections. This translates into doing things that reach people, that touch people, that convince people, and most of all, add value.

Nike has shunned the usual top-down approach to campaign releases (via traditional mediums such as TV or print) and now favors the reverse approach, where it leverages all digital touch points and creates products that form intimate connections with its target audience. Its media mix is more heavily reliant on digital and ‘non-traditional’ tactics than any other brand in the top 100 advertisers.

And the strategy is paying off. Nike now has an engaged Superbowl-sized audience 365 days a year. Which in turn translates to over $21 billion in sales — a 30% lead on its closest rival.

For more insight into Nike’s innovative brand model, check out the full article here.

Toronto, ON
February 22

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Click here to check it out.

Amsterdam developer Topher Johnson and technology architect John Cavacas share their experiences building the NIVEA augmented reality app (featuring Rihanna) here.

Chris Tan, a QA lead in Vancouver, talks us through a new testing tool called Kryptonite here.

Read all Shop Talk blog posts here.

The application, Co-Star with Rihanna (CWR), launched in July 2010 to 40 different locales.  To date it has received hundreds of thousands of page views, and almost 15 thousand videos created from all corners of the globe.

CWR was a simple to execute, but difficult to build application that had the user record themselves along with Rihanna to create a short music video for her hit song “California King Bed.”  The application could be accessed by “liking” NIVEA’s localized Facebook pages.  After the page was liked a link to the application was displayed.  After following the link, the user was presented with a short intro video of Rihanna.  The user was then asked to record two different videos.  The first was a short 3 second intro where the user could record an intro.  Video only, no sound was recorded.  After the intro was recorded, reviewed by the user and accepted, they would then record a longer sequence of them performing dance moves in a split-screen with Rihanna.  Text instructions at the bottom of the screen informed the user what to do.  They could also mirror Rihanna’s movements, as the video of her doing the moves was displayed alongside the recording.  The user is again asked to review and the second recording.  We then stitch together the two videos, along with additional video of Rihanna to create a music video that is first displayed within the Facebook application.  If the user likes and submits the video, it then goes through moderation, and if approved is displayed under a corresponding localized NIVEA domain, which the user can then share with their friends.

We expected for this application to attract a lot of attention.  To make sure that we can cope with load spikes and the servers that hosted our main NIVEA application weren’t troubled by the extra traffic we aimed to host as much of CWR on the CLOUD.  We used Amazon’s Web Services[2] (Hosting and CDN) to host most of the Facebook application.

We built the web application in PHP using the popular and well supported CakePHP framework.  This decision was made for multiple reasons.  First, it was a technology that our developers were familiar with, having worked with Facebook applications in PHP before.  The main NIVEA site is built in .NET, but we felt that Amazon’s AWS was not proven with .NET and we wanted to ensure that scaling the application to respond to demand would not be an issue.  We had a compressed timeline for the project, and the guarantee that environment set up would be easy, and would scale well was an advantage of PHP over .NET for this particular scenario.

Many different technologies came together to make this application possible.  We used PHP and Flash for the main application. The Flash application provided the best option to allow for video capture and manipulation, putting a lot of the burden of the video operations on the client side, which with our scalability goals, was a good fit. We still needed to record video on the server side, and for that we opted for a Java based media streaming server called Wowza[3].  A Java environment was set up on AWS to host the Wowza servers, and to allow for load balancing between these media servers, we built our own load balancing mechanism, which while simple, fit the needs of the project.

The Content Management System that is used for the main NIVEA site is Sitecore[4].  This is a .NET application so CWR did not directly connect with it, but it was something the client was familiar with so we wanted to use it to manage all our localized content.  Normally, an HTTP request on the NIVEA site would connect to the Sitecore database to get the content for the rendered page.  CWR needed to access this content, but wasn’t part of our main application, so we devised a different content publishing strategy that would allow the client to keep using the same CMS.  A “Static Publisher” was developed so that when certain items in the Sitecore CMS were published, the HTML or XML output along with any related media assets would be saved to disk as files.  These files would then be uploaded to the PHP application directory on AWS so that they could be consumed by the application.  An rsync pull process then ensured that this content was distributed as needed to each running application server. This process also allowed us to spin up any number of new instances without having to worry about ensuring their content and code was up to date. Essentially each new spawned instance updated itself and joined the load balancing pool.

An administrative web application was developed in to allow for a 3^rd party moderation agency to moderate all videos that were submitted.  We had to make sure that any user generated content was appropriate for viewing and met NIVEA’s guidelines.  In addition to moderation, the admin application allowed moderators review any approved or disapproved videos, view statistics for the number of videos created, and how many per country.

At the time of writing, Co-star With Rihanna has been launched in 40 different locales, with over 13 thousand videos started, and nearly 4000 videos submitted.  A majority of the videos submitted were of theBefore the application launched, NIVEA had a combination of 800,000 likes on their localized Facebook pages.  After the application, the number of likes sky-rocketed to over 2 million.

Despite some technical hurdles, the Co-Star with Rihanna Facebook application was a very successful.  We met our goal of increasing NIVEA’s brand awareness to a younger audience, and now have a wealth of in house experience with interactive Facebook applications.

Think of Kryptonite as a single tool that combines the functionality of multiple frameworks. Kryptonite makes it easy for someone with little technical background to enjoy the perks of  complex tools like JUnit and Selenium GRID with very little ramp-up. This tool can be used on multiple phases of a project, such as:

• automating acceptance tests during the design phase
• validating regression during the implementation phase
• performing the production smoke test
• monitoring the site post-launch

It allows technical users to extend testing functionality while also permitting non-technical users to create scripts via the Selenium IDE’s record/playback utility. Kryptonite also displays the visual differences between validated and current screenshots of a page’s reporting errors when differences are detected.

Kryptonite has been used on multiple Blast Radius projects and will continue to evolve. Although almost everything can be automated, this does not mean that automating everything is always cost-effective.

Kryptonite’s main goal is to minimize the time wasted when redundantly setting up Selenium tests on a project. This tool does not replace the need for QA but supplements manual tests with automated tests; it allows skilled QA engineers/analysts to focus on more complex tasks (like finding obscure security exploits!). Additional advantages of automated tests are increasingly evident closer to launch. Automated tests on areas that are expected to remain unchanged are used when migrating between environments and are invaluable when smoke testing production deployments.

Try a beta version of Kryptonite now by running the packaged sample scripts. Follow us on GitHub and watch for an upcoming non-beta release. Tutorial pages will be posted within the next few weeks detailing how to set up and begin using Kryptonite on your project.

Article by Chris Tan, QA Lead, Vancouver.

“The idea behind the APG Netherlands is to create a forum for everyone that considers him or herself Planner. Hopefully it will become something that helps us to network as well as learn from one another. We should appreciate the fact that our job is about learning and about generating insights.”

Read the full article here.