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When Test Release Went Viral, Ogilvy Knew It Had A Hit With Web Transporter 1.0

We had been hearing a lot about the Web transforming itself into this new interactive, mature medium of the future -- Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and even higher "versions" seem to dominate a fair amount of presentations and discussions in the industry. However, this seemed to have little bearing on practical application within our environment. While we were still trying to figure out how this "ideal new version" of the Internet could impact our applications, we had a problem brewing in our own backyard.

It all started in 2003 when we worked on a solution to transfer large volumes of digital content between our offices, clients, and suppliers. The system was designed to be a detailed tracking, self-maintaining, and dependent transfer mechanism with a grid of servers in 12 countries around the world. After a sluggish uptake for the first few months, the system picked up quickly and a year later was transferring a few terabytes of information around the globe. Four years later, no one expected that it would be delivering 28 terabytes per annum with a projected growth to 32 terabytes by the end of 2008.

This posed two problems, none of which were storage. The first was that the highest number of returning daily customers to the site was mostly internal employees interacting with third parties and other offices globally. They had to repeatedly log in to the system throughout the day to carry out a transaction because after any period of inactivity, their online sessions were cut off. The second problem was the magnitude of increased authentication requests that we were anticipating as the number of internal and external users of the system continued to grow at an exponentially high rate.

Users having to reconnect for every transaction started off as an inconvenience, but with increased usage turned out to be annoying and a serious time-consuming issue that we set out to solve. This set the stage for an urgent discussion around near-line interactivity. It wasn't long before whiteboards were being filled with various ideas to resolve the issue; finally, a paper place mat in a Thai restaurant seemed to take in all considerations:

• Automatic and sustained login for a controlled period of time,
• Reconnect and continue after loss of network or PC/Mac shutdown,
• Significantly increased file size limits,
• Drag and drop functionality,
• Full tracking of the asset and user experience,
• Template and software updates via remote push of a button,
• Zero support visits to the desktop.

When we looked into widget-based technology, we found that most of these types of solutions focused on one-way informational updates, but we intended to make our effort a fully transactional model in order to meet the planned objectives.

In October 2007, a limited functionality alpha release to around 20 users started to spread to over 100 and was quickly getting out of control. Most importantly, none of the users were willing to give up the pilot version even though they were fully aware of the "test release" limitations. We knew we had something here and that set the wheels in motion to quickly get a production release out.

This release has increased the volume of content moving around the system and since then we have revised the projected use to go up to 40 TB by the end of 2008. This impacts our business efficiency by improving time to market, our consistency of a solution around the Ogilvy world, our security and tracking, and a most recent addition: it's "green" from any angle you look at it.

Call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, or any version that best fits your dimension of thinking. The release of Web Transporter 1.0 has truly brought the interactive nature of the Web to the desktop, and plans are under way for a newer release to harness metadata management of digital assets and central asset library contributions from remote Ogilvy offices around the world.

Yuri Aguiar is a senior partner at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, New York. Comment below on Ogilvy's digital asset transfer and distribution system.

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