At Viacom, while working as a member of MTV Studios, I oversaw the development of our main community portal.

We had released several titles at that point and planned to release several more. The portal provided a way for users from our various communities to navigate or discover communities associated with our other offerings.

A talented of web designers worked with me to bring to life our vision of a unified community experience.

This took on the form of what we called our community portal that players could use to explore content from any of our other games, whether that was in-game news, forum announcements, or social media.

We were a new studio, and we needed a cost-effective way to increase engagement with our less popular titles. This portal was a crucial aspect of our marketing and growth strategy, so there was some pressure involved in its execution.

To alleviate some of that stress, I spoke with the designers to get a sense of what they felt was feasible, given our time and budget constraints. We met together a handful of times, and developed a thorough understanding of what we, the studio, needed and what they, the designers, knew they could deliver.

Collaborating early allowed me to make requests that were well within the design team’s scope of possibility, ensuring that key features would be included in the website’s final design. Such open communication meant that delays were avoided which was important (we were on a tight deadline!) and gave us the flexibility we needed to deploy creative solutions when problems came up.

Ultimately, we launched a portal that integrated, promoted, and guided players to the community channels of five different but complementary products, elevating the profile of each.

The goal of this project was to redirect some of the traffic from our most popular titles to our less popular titles, and the portal accomplished that goal.

Within weeks of launching the new community site/portal, we added thousands of subscribers to the communities of our lesser-known IPs, while dramatically improving reach, engagement, and retention.