About – A premier site for pet owners and enthusiasts, launched by NBCU in association with Proctor & Gamble, as part of NBCU’s strategy to launch a series of content rich sites focused on high-advertising-value vertical market segments.
About – Petside is a premier site for pet owners and enthusiasts, launched by NBCU in association with Proctor & Gamble, as part of NBCU’s strategy to launch a series of content rich sites focused on high-advertising-value vertical market segments.
Goals – Utilize NBC’s vast archive of content to be a one stop destination for all-things related to pet ownership.
Challenges – Aggregation of NBC, syndicated and third party content and dynamically organize it into vertical market specific topics through minimal editorial staffing and high level of automation. Secondly, replicate this model across multiple verticals using the same platform and within 4 weeks launch time per vertical.
Result – After performing an extensive market analysis of potential vendors, NBC Digital settled on RAMP as the technology partner for this strategic initiative. With limited editorial input, NBCU is able to use RAMPworkflow to process RSS and MRSS feeds from all desired content sources through a single analysis pipeline in order to organize the site topically and publish relevant pages. This has yielded hundreds of topic opportunities across health, wellness, and breed categories that are published to PetSide.com through RAMPdiscover. Once published, RAMP topic pages are updated with relevant content as it is processed and new topic page are dynamically identified and published as new themes are discovered.
For video content, Petside uses RAMP:workflow to process NBCU, partner, and YouTube content for transcripts and tags. This content is then published into individual landing pages using RAMP MetaPlayer technology to provide a seamless playback experience regardless of content origin: NBCU content is played through the NBCU player while YouTube content is played through the YouTube player. The MetaPlayer technology wraps each underlying player with a common set of controls, or “chrome” to provide a consistent user experience.
In order to create an authoritative vertical “hub”, PetSide wanted to make sure that the site search functionality included an index of authoritative third-party sites that provide complimentary content to the editorial experience. To achieve this, RAMPengage is used to crawl numerous third party websites and power a “Best of the Web” section on all search results pages. This ensures that, regardless of query, PetSide will have the answer or know where the answer can be found on the web.
Based on the success of the PetSide launch, NBC has tapped into the RAMP platform for additional verticals including a UK pet site and a health information site. RAMP provides NBC with a cost-effective approach to launching new sites very quickly that incorporate SEO, site search, and web publishing best practices in order to achieve advertiser impression and audience exposure goals.
