Case Study: McCann Erickson achieves an 8-week launch of a scalable, AWS-hosted social-media contest platform with ThoughtWorks

McCann Erickson - Customer Case Study

McCann Erickson Worldwide needed to launch a high-profile social media contest, "Search for the World’s Best Couple," to drive brand awareness for an Australian jeweller in North America but discovered Facebook’s IP limitations mid-campaign. With under eight weeks to go they required a global platform that could handle massive traffic spikes, heavy user-generated video uploads, community interaction, a ratings engine and live reporting—yet had no hosting partner or scalable infrastructure in place.

ThoughtWorks stepped in, re-prioritized requirements, and delivered the site in weekly iterative builds using the existing codebase and continuous testing in production-like environments on AWS (EC2, ELB, RDS, S3), plus OAuth integration for social features and streaming media. The result was a fully tested, scalable, hosted contest platform launched on schedule that handled peak loads, supported the campaign’s social engagement and reporting needs, and could be scaled down after the promotion.

McCann Erickson