We’ve spent the last month working with the Creative Labs team at Google in the UK to create their new Zeitgeist site.
The Background:
Google Zeitgeist events have been occurring since 2006, with annual conferences across Europe and the US. The events invite thought leaders to discuss the ideas that are strongly influencing their industries. From Prince Charles to Will.i.am the videos offer some truly inspirational content!
After winning a bid against two other agencies, Beyond was asked to expand the Zeitgeist brand by bringing the videos to a wider audience and position Zeitgeist as a global though leading initiative.
The Brief:
Google wanted to create a standalone site that would allow them to effectively showcase the videos from all the events across all the years dating back to 2007 as well as centralize the entire Zeitgeist video collection which was scattered across multiple YouTube channels. There was also a requirement to create a bespoke administration system to ensure effective and easy upload of all future Zeitgeist videos.
Our Solution:
Using the YouTube Data API and a lot of Python coding, we were able to pull in all the existing Zeitgeist data from its various locations as well as enabling the editing of this data through an easy-to-use administration system rather than through multiple channel administrations.
Users are invited to comment, like and subscribe on the content using their YouTube logins, ensuring a 2 way stream of data between the existing channels and the new Zeitgeist Minds platform.
Beyond wanted to create an interactive solution that would showcase videos is an interesting and engaging way. The Video Wall allows users and search for videos based on a pre-defined set of filters. The whole site was written in HTML and JavaScript, as opposed to the initial idea to develop in Flash, proving that websites can achieve nice animation effects and transitions despite using HTML.
Our administration system provides an easily customizable way to edit Zeitgeist videos, speaker information, highlight chapters, and provide video transcripts. The system also allows the administrator to select screen shots from videos to use as thumbnails on the video wall, providing a solution to the traditional wide screen lines and advertisement overlays on YouTube videos. Zeitgeist’s new YouTube channel is a replica of the website, allowing comments, likes and sharing.
Google is looking to reuse the technology Beyond built on other projects in the future, and we look forward to continue working with them!
Visit the site at www.zeitgeistminds.com.