A High Performance Online Gaming Micro Site for Publishers Clearing House

The Client   

Publishers Clearing House, one of the largest and most successful direct marketing companies, was founded in 1953 as a magazine circulation agency selling discounted subscriptions by direct mail. Today, the company promotes its products by providing website visitors with a chance to win valuable sweepstakes prizes. With more than 3.5 million new registrants per year, more than 5 million unique visitors per month and a database of more than 10 million customers, the PCH Online Network is a collection of websites to reach a diverse group of men and women online. 


The PCH Online Network is primarily an advertising platform that attracts more than 5 million unique monthly users. With a network that delivers more than 142 million monthly ad impressions, it offers advertisers with unique CPA and CPM opportunities. Advertisers can reach a diverse group of customers, through traditional banner ads as well as customized campaigns that include sweepstakes, co-registration, newsletter opt-ins and other elements.
 
The details of the sites on PCH Online Network is as below - 
  
Site Description
PCH Lotto
  • A 24/7 opportunity to win by playing very popular Lotto and scratch cards
  • Attracts over a million visits per month and around 100,000 new customers a month
  • Combines pre-game banner ads, pre-rolls and special offers to create unique and successful advertising opportunities for consumer brand marketers
PCH Trivia
  • Provides an entertaining way for users to test their knowledge in a highly engaging game-like setting
  • Leverages popular trivia categories such as, celebrities, cooking, history, sports, movies, and TV to resonate across a wide audience base
  • Awards users tokens for correct answers which can be used to win prizes and enter sweepstakes across the PCHGames website
  • Offers a unique combination of banner ads, pre-rolls and co-registration opportunities
PCH Games
  •  Consistently one of the most popular sites in the PCH Online network, PCHGames.com attracts over 2 million visits per month
  • Keeps user interest elevated with a large selection of casual games in the arcade, casino, card, sports, strategy and word categories
PCH Search & Win
  • It is a search engine like Google, Yahoo etc;
  • For every search, if the search happens to be a winning search, the visitor is awarded a prize. The prizes range from a gift certificate to a new car.
PCH Quiz4Cash
  • Garnering 600,000 monthly site visits, PCHQuiz4Cash.com challenges site visitors to take quizzes and earn cash across a diverse variety of interest areas
  • Offers unique combination of banner ads, pre-rolls and co-registration opportunities
  • Special advertiser-sponsored quizzes link players to a site chosen by the advertiser for the answer
PCH Cash-back
  • Visitors always get rewarded when they shop through PCH Cash Back website.
  • The site also provides the user with the best in online coupons and discounts.
PCH Coupons
  • Visitors get the best in online coupons and discounts which can be conveniently printed and used for shopping.
  • They can win prizes or get free gifts when they shop for specific products.
  • They can also browse through recipes, pick up the favorite dishes & use coupons to shop for the ingredients for the dish.
PCH Scratch card
  • Visitors can create scratch cards for friends, send them.
  • They can also receive scratch cards from friends
  • When the 3 seals on card are scratched, if all 3 symbols match, then they have won!
 
 

The Challenge

The PCH Online Network grew rapidly and added several sites in quick succession. These sites were developed and hosted by multiple 3rd party vendors; and as a result, the PCH IT team had very little operating knowledge about these sites. This situation resulted in several challenges: 

  • Slow Time-to-Market: As a key player in this domain, PCH expected to be able to launch new campaigns, promotions, and new ad campaigns rapidly. However, in this operating model, all changes had to be coordinated and communicated across multiple vendors, which resulted in tremendous delays. 
  • High Operating Costs: As the sites were hosted by individual 3rd party vendors, there was no optimal sharing of resources, which resulted in high operating costs. 
  • Manual Workflow and Errors: The content description, review process and final approval were handled manually and outside the scope of the system. This took considerable time and was also prone to recurring human errors. 

The Opportunity

As the business matured, PCH identified a need to consolidate the sites under the PCH Online Network to microsites on a single internally-hosted platform. Such a platform would provide the following advantages: 

  • Generate Cost Savings primarily by internal hosting and a reduced dependence on development teams to make content changes. 
  • Enable Rapid Time-To-Market by creating an internal approval workflow and launching the microsites on a generic platform.
  • Build Re-usable API's that would enable easy integration with social networking websites and widgets.

With these goals in mind, PCH evaluated several IT vendors and eventually selected Inkriti. As an e-business focused technology consulting company, Inkriti brought tremendous prior experience to the table. Furthermore, Inkriti has expertise with high-performance systems that was critical to the success of such an engagement. In addition, their unique expertise in Web 2.0 technologies, combined with a proven global delivery model, made Inkriti a good fit for this engagement. 

The Inkriti Approach

The project was executed in a three phases:
PCHLotto-DevProcess

Requirements

Inkriti studied the 12-15 microsites that comprised The PCH Online Network and conducted a detailed feature evaluation. The objective of this analysis was to find underlying similarities in the functionalities, and to also identify areas that were unique to each Microsite. Such an analysis would help in the design of a framework that would address the commonalities while accommodating the variations. 

Microsite/ Functionality

 PCH Lotto PCH Search & Win PCH Games PCH Quiz4 Cash PCH Cash back PCH Coupons PCH Tips PCH Scratch cards
Content Management x x x x x x x x
User Management x x x x x x x x
User Segmentation x x x x x x - -

Business Component

 x x x x x x x x
Web Analytics x x x x x x x x
Reporting x x x x x x x x
Integration x x x - - - - -
SEO x - x x x x x x
Mobile x x x x x - - -
Widgets x x x x x x x x

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Prototyping 

By the end of the requirement study, it was decided that the project shall be implemented on a custom CMS developed by PCH IT team. Inkriti team built a working model of the PCH Lotto Microsite on the generic framework. The high level solution architecture is as below: 

PCH Lotto Solution Architecture

Implementation 

The project was executed in a global delivery model with Inkriti development teams spread across India and US. 

PCH Team Structure

The implementation was inspired from the SCRUM project management discipline and certain features from SCRUM had been adapted for the project execution - 2 week Sprints, Daily Scrum Meeting, Scrum Back log. 

There were certain challenges that were unique to such a a multi-vendor environment : 

  • Configuration Management: Due to overlaps with the internal IT team on the content management system functionality, the codebase had to be managed concurrently across multiple project teams. The challenge was to address the versionioning issues. We adopted the SCRUM methodology : at the end of each sprint the changes in our branch were merged back into the trunk. After such a merge, the code would be tested thoroughly to minimize impact of these code changes. 

  • Multi-Vendor Coordination: We faced unique challenges in adopting the SCRUM methodology to a multi-vendor environment. It was quite hard to plan for "shippable deliverables" at the end of each sprint, given the dependencies on other vendors. 

The Results

PCH Lotto has been relaunched on a brand new architecture that includes several Web 2.0 technologies. The robust framework combined with a new look/feel brings tremendous simplicity and elegance to the user experience. 

  • Re-usable API's - All the functionality of the website (login, registration, claiming sweepstakes, Lotto game play) is implemented using a robust SOA layer, and is available as web services. Such an implementation enables future consumption of these services from other websites and III-Party widgets. 

  • Cost Savings

    • The site is now hosted in-house, thereby reducing the infrastructure costs.
    • In addition, changes to content on the site can now be made direct by the marketing team, without any involvement from the development team. 
    • Finally, the site is very easy to maintain. For example, the entire look and feel of the website can be changed by merely replacing the style sheets and does not have to involve changing any code.

  • Rapid Time-to-Market: With the investment made in building a generic framework, future microsites can be quickly migrated onto this platform and launched rapidly. This will reduce the development timelines radically, and enable a more rapid Time-To-Market. 

The Technology Set

  • .NET 

  • AJAX

  •  XML /  XSLT

  • Adobe CS4

  • Flash

  • SOA

  • Web Services

 

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