Google Outside: A Story Telling Platform
We recently launched the second iteration of the Google Outside DOOH Campaign in London, showcasing the best of Google’s Search App (GSA) mobile application.
Our challenge was to bring contextually-aware stories to hundreds of digital screens around the city, and provide a unique and relevant experience to each and every location.
This had never been done before. Traditional DOOH screens are meant to display videos, images, or short animations with little to no variation from screen to screen.
We created a story telling engine that displays contextual stories in the form of connected content cards that are updated constantly and looped on each screen. They bring the best of the GSA app from mobile to the DOOH environment.
The platform processes huge volumes of disparate data quickly, requiring a robust asynchronous data generation engine capable of processing thousands of calls to a variety of Google APIs in parallel.
We implemented bespoke components to orchestrate asynchronous data retrieval and coordinate data dependencies to mash up the right data into carefully tailored story templates meant to impart relevance and uniqueness to each story.
We tapped into Google’s Cloud Platform and Services to deliver a scalable, secure and flexible platform:
- App Engine as cloud-compute platform
- Compute Engine to run a set of VMs for real-time logging and monitoring
- Cloud Datastore for data management and storage
- Cloud Storage for edge-caching fast access to processed JSON data
- App Engine Tasks Queues for load balancing and job throttling
We associated Task Queues with specific jobs, like consuming a given API or processing a certain flow task. Task Queues allowed us to load-balance the workload and throttle job processing via configuration tweaks, which turned out to be really handy across the whole system architecture.
By taking advantage of Python’s asynchronous capabilities and Google AppEngine Task Queues, we were able to implement parallel data processing generating around 3,000 unique stories a day pushed 4 times a day to hundreds of screens around the city.
As part of the system, we created a series of web interfaces based on Angular.js to allow our content editors, copywriters, QA engineers, and internal teams to define, preview, and review every story, from templates to real dynamic data. Our tools enabled us to review every story, at every location, at any time of day.
We delivered a dynamic, scalable, robust and secure digital marketing platform for Google, capable of powering digital storytelling campaigns across countries, languages, locations and devices. It’s a first of its kind in the Digital Out Of Home environment!