Oovvuu is the newest addition to our group of partners demonstrating excellence in implementing best-in-class solutions for WordPress at scale. This Australian media tech “scale-up” provides the market-leading platform to seamlessly embed videos in news articles, supporting publishers’ goals to drive traffic, increase engagement, and improve monetization.
Oovvuu was founded by journalists-turned-entrepreneurs with the three-fold mission of:
Putting a contextually-relevant video in every article in the world;
Delivering trusted news to a billion people; and
Creating an advertising model to sustain journalism in the 21st century.
Launched in Sydney in late 2014, Oovvuu has partnered with hundreds of broadcasters and publishers (including Reuters, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, The Guardian, and Australia’s Seven West Media) to distribute reliable news to millions of people worldwide daily.
News video consumption is exploding worldwide, yet the news industry faces increasing headwinds. Oovvuu’s focus is on building a consortium of trusted publishers and broadcasters and lasting success for the industry. The outcome of that is a safer, more trusting world for billions.
Oovvuu uses world-leading proprietary machine learning technology to read news articles, watch videos, and recommend matches. Their technology is designed to fit into the workflow of busy newsrooms and to put the power in the hands of journalists to improve news reporting.
At Media24 of South Africa, Oovvuu grew traffic by 30x and engagement 26x in seven months, leading to significant revenue gains in their video strategy.
“Oovvuu is built by journalists for journalists. Like WordPress VIP, we recognise publishers and broadcasters have public trust and a burning passion to report the news. We built the tech that binds them together and now we are focused on working with the WordPress community to bring our common mission to the world.”
How we planned the first virtual BigWP in just 3 weeks
Back in January, we laid out plans for BigWP in 2020. BigWP is an enterprise event series where our customers, partners, and friends gather to share the exciting things they’re building with WordPress at scale. We had a big vision for multiple events in New York, San Francisco, and London this year.
Then everything changed.
We knew pretty quickly we didn’t want to miss out on BigWP by waiting to see how the pandemic would progress, so we made a quick decision to pivot to a virtual event.
This post outlines our approach to the first-ever virtual BigWP. We hope it can be helpful for you as you navigate your way through the world of newly-remote events.
New Considerations
There are so many new considerations in taking an in-person event online. For us, those included:
Could we engage high-quality speakers on short notice?
Would people want to attend with all the distractions they were enduring?
Might this open up the opportunity for more attendees without being geographically limited?
Could we keep the balance of informative and fun that makes BigWP so special?
Turns out, the answer to each of these questions was a resounding “yes!” We realized we had a great opportunity to bring the San Francisco and New York events together, and dubbed it BigWP Americas —which also allowed us to extend invites to clients, prospects, and partners in Canada and South America. Our first win!
Next up… everything else.
Mission 1: Platform selection
In choosing a platform to host the event, we wanted to ensure it was interactive and something that attendees were familiar with using. Our immediate thought was to host this as a Zoom webinar, but that wouldn’t have allowed the audience to be seen, only the speakers. Since the enterprise WordPress community was at the core of this event, we shifted to what attendees would later call “the largest Zoom meeting [they’ve] ever been to.” Not only did this allow everyone to see and interact with each other, but it also allowed us to use breakout rooms for the Happy Hour to satisfy the social aspect of the evening.
Mission 2: Branded event website
While we previously used Meetup.com for BigWP events, we outgrew the constraints of the platform. We needed a site that could become a one-stop resource hub for everything BigWP—while also being reliable, easy to update, and granting us full ownership of the content. We built the new site on the VIP Cloud, which allowed us to serve multiple events and locations simultaneously. This move will also enable us to create a resource library of past talks, all in one place.
Mission 3: Compelling content
Choosing the right speakers for this enterprise community event was essential. We always work to strike the right balance of informative and interesting.
Matias is the Argentina-based CTO of the web development agency SAU/CAL. He actively contributes to open source projects and he and his team are certified WooCommerce Experts and are a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner. They build, enhance, and maintain high-scale online stores.
Cathi is a designer and UX Architect for web development agency (and Gold agency partner) XWP and UX consultancy UXATT. Her teams work with companies to create great experiences for humans through UX audits and informal research studies.
“Web Stories and the early version of Story Editor” Presented by: Paul Bakaus, AMP & Web Creator Relations, Google
Paul joined as our keynote speaker. We were thrilled when he did a live demo to share a product feature that is yet to launch! This was a great way to give our community behind-the-scenes access to what’s happening next with AMP and WordPress.
Mission 4: Delightful swag
Swag is a big part of our physical events. The right swag is a great way to leave a long-lasting, positive impression on your attendees, and we challenge ourselves again and again to up our swag game each time.
For our first-ever virtual event, we wanted to create a physical aspect of the event despite the distance. Enter: gift boxes with all the fixings for mocktails/cocktails. We chose a recipe inspired by the Smoky Lemon Mule featured on SugarAndCharm.com, who call WordPress home. This element allowed for a fun surprise arriving to attendees’ homes the week of the event, and created a shared experience over Zoom as attendees raised their custom tumblers in a toast.
Mission 5: On to the next one!
We produced an event in less than three weeks from concept through design to go-live.
This agility was thanks largely to moving the BigWP site over to the VIP Cloud. The new site gave us full control over the user journey and empowered us to create a richly-branded event using minimal technical resources—just one (awesome) designer and one (fantastic) developer.
Happily, BigWP was received well by both the attendees and the speakers. We can’t wait to host our next event, BigWP EMEA, coming soon!
We are proud to welcome Viafoura as a new Featured Technology Partner!
Viafoura joins our growing group of partners with proven excellence implementing best-in-class solutions for WordPress at scale. This new partnership offers WordPress VIP clients the ability to integrate a suite of engagement tools onto their digital properties, which will allow them to build and retain a loyal audience.
Viafoura is a software company committed to providing media organizations with essential resources and tools that engage audiences and contribute to highly lucrative business strategies. Fueled by a team of dedicated product and data experts, Viafoura ensures that every client is following the best possible path to maximize their revenue.
This solution delivers a wide variety of tools and features that improve the visitor experience. These include conversation, live blog, community chat, content recommendation, and rating and review widgets — all backed by sophisticated moderation services.
Leveraged by major media companies like Reach PLC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Graham Media Group, and GateHouse Media, Viafoura’s solution is designed to transform passive audience members into active brand supporters. They also offer first-party audience data, actionable engagement insights, and guidance through a dedicated support team. To learn more about Viafoura’s solution, you can access a full overview of their products and services here.
“With consumers now craving more online engagement than ever before, businesses have a significant opportunity to nurture the traffic right on their websites or apps. We’re looking forward to connecting with WordPress VIP clients to discuss how Viafoura can help them fully monetize their digital audiences.
We are proud to welcome Athletics as a new agency partner! Athletics is an independent creative studio working at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology. They’re best known for designing contemporary brand identities and online experiences for clients like IBM, The Pulitzer Prizes, MoMA, and Major League Soccer.
Creative conspirators
Founded in a former boxing gym in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2004, Athletics began as a collective of independent designers led by Matt Owens and Jason Gnewikow, who linked together to suit the needs of their particular projects and entrepreneurial ventures. Today, with a team of nearly 30 designers, coders, strategists, writers, and producers, led by a partnership that includes Malcolm Buick, Jameson Proctor, and Christopher Kissock, that entrepreneurial spirit endures.
In addition to their client work, Athletics develops its own products, platforms, and stories — from boutique hotels (The Graham & Co) to fragrance lines (Carlen Parfums) — seeking out opportunities to invest in and build brands with creative conspirators from Brooklyn to Berlin. Counting among its ranks New Yorkers, musicians, Scotsmen, skateboarders, Aussies, perfumers, and gardeners, the Athletics team brings a world of interests and experiences under one roof, while remaining united by the belief that good design can contribute to a more intelligent, optimistic world.
From entrepreneurs to enterprise
Guided by the principle that good design should inspire meaningful change, Athletics partners with entrepreneurs like Hubble, Elysium, and VTS to turn ideas into sustainable businesses, and helps industry leaders like Citrix, Google, and Viacom adapt to the demands of modern culture and commerce. Whether conceiving a brand name and strategy for CodeNation, a tech education non-profit, or designing and developing a cutting-edge editorial website for The Counter, an investigative newsroom focused on food, Athletics aims to build and engage audiences, cut through the visual clutter, and hold compelling conversations on behalf of its clients.
In 2019 alone, the studio launched an energetic brand identity for Nashville Soccer Club, a powerful editorial platform for workflow digitization company ServiceNow, a generative financial health visualization system for Banked, and multiple IBM sub-brands, including Security, Garage, and Developer.
Empowerment at scale
“We adopted WordPress as our CMS of choice several years ago. There were several reasons for this but by far the most important has been our ability to empower our clients with the solutions they need to realize opportunities and solve challenges with WordPress. From our perspective, WordPress VIP embodies this promise of empowerment at scale for publishers and the enterprise.”
— Jameson Proctor, Partner and Executive Digital Director, Athletics
The new website will connect delegates, members of the media, and those interested in getting involved with the convention with the resources they need to stay up-to-date on convention planning. The site will continue to be updated with original content and innovative tools that invite all Americans to be a part of the historic event.
The website has been built with the goal of adhering to some of the most up-to-date accessibility standards used by the web design community, and will continue to be tested and modified to ensure it is reaching the widest possible audience. All of the content is also featured in Spanish.
Our friends at Wide Eye Creative provided art direction, design, and web development for the brand new Democratic National Convention website. Branding strategy was developed by Zero Studios, the New York and Milwaukee-based creative firm behind the convention’s official logo and visual identity.
WordPress VIP, the leading provider of enterprise WordPress, is the official digital platform for the new website. With expertise in delivering content-rich digital experiences for large organizations, WordPress VIP’s roots lie in the open source movement, which democratizes publishing through accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use.
Founded in 2012 as a mobile app development company, founders George Deglin and Long Vo first started off as mobile game developers but ultimately transitioned into creating OneSignal after other push notification vendors couldn’t fit their needs. With OneSignal, Y Combinator alums George Deglin and Long Vo have built a powerful solution to help marketers and developers around the world.
“Since deploying OneSignal, push notifications have grown into Future’s third-largest traffic source, delivering millions of sessions a month to our publications.”
— Matt Greenwood, Audience Development Executive at Future PLC
OneSignal is the market-leading solution with an infrastructure that already supports over 850,000 notifications sent per second, every day. They provide enterprise-grade tools that help grow and retain audiences for multiple verticals. Trusted by companies like USA TODAY Sports Media Group, Product Hunt, and Future PLC; they’re the provider of choice for anyone looking for a best-of-breed customer engagement platform.
“WordPress support has always been a focus. Our objective is to deliver intuitive, easy-to-integrate messaging tools, so partnering directly with WordPress VIP is a natural fit to help great content to scale.”
We are proud to welcome Weidenhammer as a new Silver agency partner!
Weidenhammer was formed in 1978 to help clients with Information Technology. Over 12 years ago, Weidenhammer’s agency arm started building websites on WordPress to better serve their clients’ needs.
Today, Weidenhammer builds incredible enterprise-grade web experiences – and has a blast doing it. They pay attention to the subtle design pinstriping and extra functionality that sets websites apart. Their team brings a ton of knowledge, experience and tech-nerdiness to every project. They get a kick out of solving crazy hard problems and achieving what their clients thought wasn’t possible.
“In combining tech knowledge with creativity, our team views our work as a craft. We take tremendous pride in what we build for our clients.”
— Jeremy Jones, Director of Interactive and Marketing
Weidenhammer’s strengths include all aspects of digital marketing including strategy and discovery, comprehensive website audits and roadmaps, SEO, PPC, email, and social. They provide dedicated WordPress development, custom theme development, responsive design, UI/UX planning and design, and progressive web apps. With extensive ecommerce experience, they can provide content/data migrations from other platforms, API development, and integrations, as well as continuous website maintenance and enhancement.
We are proud to welcome Digital River as a new WordPress VIP Gold Technology Partner!
Digital River joins our growing group of partners with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale. Digital River is now WordPress VIP’s first single-solution, global payments partner, bringing a unique and unparalleled value for our clients.
For more than 25 years, Digital River has been an innovator in the world of ecommerce. With its API-powered solutions, Digital River is laser-focused on offering clients the ability to cut through the ever-growing complexities and risk of expanding their commerce globally. Its unique seller of record model allows Digital River to take over key financial elements of an online sale, including payments, taxes and compliance. Clients can focus on growing their business, while Digital River focuses on keeping it secure.
With 20 local acquirers, more than 70 payment methods worldwide and 46 currencies supported, Digital River helps clients sell direct to customers, whether they live around the corner or around the world.
“Ecommerce offers a world of opportunity, and with that comes challenges. Our passion is helping brands focus on building exceptional ecommerce experiences, while we take on the back-office complexities that tend to keep ecommerce teams up at night. Within the WordPress VIP ecosystem, Digital River provides clients unparalleled scale, security, performance, and flexibility.”
We are proud to welcome Modern Tribe as a new agency partner! Modern Tribe is one of 33 agencies in this exclusive group with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale. They are also the founders and creators of The Events Calendar, the number one adopted, selling, and grossing WordPress events management framework.
Modern Tribe is a digital agency that specializes in the design and development of industrial-strength WordPress implementations. Huge networks, heavy traffic, complex integrations, custom plugins—brands seek out Modern Tribe when they need to inject enterprise capabilities into the world’s most user-friendly content management system (WordPress!).
Comprised of 130+ strategists, designers, engineers and project managers, the Modern Tribe team is fully remote and brings together multi-disciplinary problem-solvers who use design and technology to solve sticky business challenges for the world’s leading brands.
“When it comes to infrastructure, there’s no single ‘right solution’ for our breadth of customers. It’s important we have a range of partnerships, and WordPress VIP provides a platform that supports more of the custom solutioning that we offer our clients.”
WordPress VIP is excited to welcome our newest Silver agency partner: Upstatement!
Upstatement is a design and engineering studio that builds content creation tools to power valuable user experiences. Drawing on its founders’ deep backgrounds in news and media, Upstatement empowers clients with bespoke content strategies, user experiences, and tools that achieve results. The agency has won Webby Awards three years running, and was named one of FastCompany’s most important design companies of 2019.
Founded in 2008, based in Boston, and with 43 employees in five cities, Upstatement works with clients all over the country following an agile process and unique dedicated staffing model.
With over a decade of expertise building digital products for enterprise scale, Upstatement has built flagship websites for brands like Tito’s Vodka, Moms Demand Action, PBS Newshour, MIT, and many others.
The agency also pioneered the use of responsive design (with the original website for The Boston Globe) and decoupled WordPress (Harvard Graduate School of Design). What’s more, their open source templating tools are in use on some of the biggest WordPress sites out there, from the Obama Foundation to Spotify.
“We’re excited to work more closely with WordPress VIP to help our clients build the best experiences out there. Editors and writers are users too. We’re looking forward to helping push the envelope in terms of the content creation tools available to our clients.”
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