theCoderie

MTVIggy is a new multi-platform brand at MTV. They describe themselves as, 'your global pop culture and music network.' MTVIggy is a departure from MTV’s more traditional models, in that it has a more vested and robust online experience than it does on traditional television. MTVIggy seeks out diasporic, bicultural audiences across the globe. Their ideal consumer is just as likely to go crazy over Boa (the Korean/Japanese pop-star sensation) as they are to be passionate about Obama’s American health care policy.

Starting from scratch, with little more than a name and some fledgling content, we joined the Iggy team early on and helped them create both an identity and an online strategy. We advised when to leverage the robust technical resources at MTV Networks, and when it made sense to depart from the traditional practices and try something new.

We built a small in-house team, and brought in contractors to get this large-scale media site off the ground. From the first line of code, the site was designed to scale and participate in the larger social network ecosystem. There was a virtual simultaneous launch of the destination site and the Facebook application. When web producers update content in the backend CMS system, it is instantaneously available across all online channels. Users can engage Iggy on Facebook, television, the destination website, and even MTV’s popular Flux social networking platform.

The challenge in this project was to make a scalable content distribution system which could be maintained and programmed by a staff with limited resources and very little technical expertise. The site also had to scale elegantly and quickly to keep up with growing traffic.

MTVIggy continues to evolve and grow at the frenetic pace that is so necessary to compete.