Award voting platform

Client

El Ojo de Iberoamérica is an international advertisement creativity award that's been growing for the past 25 years. Behind it is LatinSpots, a media company specialized in communication, advertising, marketing, film, events and entertainment, and one of the opinion leaders in the Ibero-American advertising market.

It is also one of the oldest clients in the Manas portfolio, a fruitful relationship that began back in 2005.

Since 2005 we have been working with Manas on our registration platform for the international festival, and each year we have been improving, expanding our system and updating ourselves technologically, from the original CD’s and DVD’s to today’s multifunctional apps, for which the technological support and advice from the entire Manas team was key.

Santiago Keller Sarmiento President at LatinSpots & Founder of the International Festival El Ojo de Iberoamérica

Requirements & Context

For their award festival, LatinSpots needed a platform that allowed creative agencies to submit their pieces and judges to evaluate them. More than 3,200 ideas, works and campaigns participate in the festival every year, created and carried out by more than 500 advertising agencies, producers and advertisers from more than 25 countries in Latin America, the United States, Spain and Portugal. These entries are judged by 300 top industry professionals led by 20 Award Presidents. In addition, after the entire voting process, throughout its three days of conferences, recognitions and awards, El Ojo holds a unique event of inspiration, training and meeting for an average of 2500 professionals from all over Latin America, as well as prestigious speakers and attendees from America, Europe and Asia.

The first version we developed took the form of a DVD with a Flash app that came inside a book which contained all of the nominees and awardees and was developed in less than a month.

A second version added voting features and lasted a few years, until the client decided to take the system to an online platform. That third version took the form of a web app that not only had a function for judges to vote on pieces, but also let creative agencies register their pieces. This version continued to be used until 2020.

In 2021, seeing that the codebase was quite old, we thought it would be a good idea to do a full redesign and rebuild the system using a new technology stack.

Approach

We decided on a streamlined stack with React (Next/js) and Airtable, which allowed us to build the entire system and deploy it quite fast, and which would then give the client complete autonomy to manage content in a quick and easy way.

After so many years of working with this project, we had a deep understanding of every one of the users’ needs and what it would take to implement them. Airtable covered most of the backend features required at a low cost, with the extra perk of having considerably shorter ramp-up times.

Results

What started out as an experiment ended in 3 different apps that were developed in a little more than 3 months.

Each of the applications centered around a key functionality:

• Registration: Users can sign up, register ads, upload files and send a bill request.
• Voting: Judges are assigned to award categories, and they can watch or listen to ads, vote or abstain.
• Content management: Subscribers, both press or members of the public, have different level access to content.

For future iterations of this platform, the roadmap includes an app for ticket sales and another one for up & coming talent.

Advertisement data sheet

For the voting, one of the key visuals is the data sheet with all the information for the piece being evaluated.

Award Inscriptions

Judges and organizers can see, at a glance, every piece entered in the contest, with their corresponding information and price.

Inscription assets

The uploading of assets for campaigns is one of the pivotal features of the platform, because it needs to handle large media pieces very well.

Award category round

Users navigate through a series of thumbnails of the nominated pieces for each category and have a reference of the time left for voting.

Vote

Inside each category, users can re-watch the pieces, read a brief description, and assign their votes.

Abstain

If voters should choose to abstain from voting, a window pops up for them to briefly describe their reasons for doing so.

Award results

At the end of the voting period, users go back to a list of all categories, which they can navigate to see the award results, and rewatch the winning pieces.