Producing television advertising is a global business. An advertising production company may have their office in London while needing to show a new script to a director who is on location in Hong Kong. It is exactly because of this type of situation that Stink decided to make their current in-house system an online application. Essentially this is business software that is accessed using a web browser and is available to staff wherever they may be, provided they have an Internet connection.

Consultancy

At the beginning of the project I spent some time at the Stink offices understanding the flow of information within their business and how the system, we were embarking on building, would interact with this data.

They like to tease me about it now but we were quite chuffed with the pattern of yellow sticky notes that we used to cover a desk with while mapping out the architecture of their soon be be built custom information system.

Contacts and Companies

The development process was broken up into phases and the first part was to provide Stink with a database of company contacts. There was an element of rescuing information from their old system and developing automating importing tools, with the help of a 3rd party information provider.

Scripts and Send Outs

The next phase of the project was to enable the system to track the scripts that Stink receives from advertising agencies and the show reels that they send out to promote their work. Of course this information needed to be recorded against the contact and company information established in the first phase of the project.

Recording a show reel on the system meant we had to utilise a web service provided by a 3rd party service provider that Stink use to store all of their adverts online. This meant that their online repository and in house database remain in synch.

Groups and Mail Outs

Contacts on the system can be added to a group and an email sent out to each of the individuals in the group. A small, bespoke, content management system was also provided to allow Stink to publish web pages to market their new work.

This project is great example of a web application and shows how business software has changed over the last 10 years.