case studies

“Do Something Different” for CBBC

The brief:
“Do Something Different” was a national campaign to encourage children to try new and exciting things in their spare time — from tasting a new food to climbing a mountain, or even learning how to kite surf. The campaign was supported by a TV show broadcast on BBC One and the CBBC channel, and a safe social networking website for children to pledge, complete and customise tasks (‘DSD’s).

The BBC required that the website and show be tightly integrated, allowing the show's presenters to invite viewers to go to the site, and to report live statistics from the site. A further key objective for the website was to make searching for DSDs easy, intuitive and fun for children.

Solution and delivery:
Ymogen developed the site architecture to support the high peak loads resulting from on-air invitations to participate — up to 1,000 interactions per second. Ymogen worked in close collaboration with Start Creative, who designed the vibrant look and feel for the site.

A central feature of the site was the DSD map which allowed presenters to find children around the nation and report on live DSD statistics, in the same way that presenters currently cover the weather. Mapping functionality to enable searching of DSDs by location and type was also available to visitors to the website. Ymogen developed special search algorithms that could scale to many thousands of concurrent queries, to ensure rapid response to location and category searches even at the highest loads.

Outcome for the client:
The site is a flagship project for the BBC. It was one of the first sites to be externally hosted yet fully integrated with the BBC's single sign on processes. Ymogen worked closely with the BBC to ensure the site adhered to their stringent security policies and developed bespoke systems for moderation, reporting, and for managing user accounts and DSDs.