National Geographic by the numbers
The National Geographic challenge
National Geographic’s legacy CMS made posting content a time-consuming and manual process for producers and editors. The site was overly complex on the back end, and the front end prevented National Geographic from offering the stunning visual experiences that the brand was known for. In order to provide a cinematic user experience worthy of the brand, National Geographic needed to completely revamp its online presence.
With a massive library of content, National Geographic needed a customizable solution to align with the company-wide taxonomy. Doing so would make it faster and easier to organize, present and deliver dynamic multimedia content. The new CMS also needed to seamlessly integrate with the corporate online video platform, Comcast MPX, in order to make it simpler for editors to manage and curate the experience for millions of online visitors.
Brightspot has an incredibly fast, sleek front end, and the back end is intuitive, simple and effective. Basically, it helps us publish faster.
The Brightspot solution for National Geographic
In just three months, Brightspot met National Geographic’s complex and multifaceted requirements, enabling the company to:
- Create visually stunning and immersive multimedia experiences quickly and easily, doubling traffic and increasing the time users spend on the site.
- Manage, host and present compelling video content via a seamless integration with its existing OVP, Comcast MPX.
- Increase discoverability by instituting a company-wide taxonomy system for tagging related content, significantly simplifying and speeding up editorial and development workflows.
- Showcase curated content easily with featured videos and editor’s picks sections on an enhanced, fully responsive front end.
- Reduce reliance on IT with new, streamlined publishing experiences complemented by bulk editing tools, customizable workflows and live previews.
This solution was Brightspot Media Desk, which supports ingestion of National Geographic’s world-renowned video content. Automated classification helps align each asset against National Geographic’s complex taxonomy of tens of thousands of terms that include topics, shows, products and more.
Today, National Geographic's video library is accessible via Brightspot Media Desk, supported by real-time data synchronization with Comcast MPX OVP. Once available in the CMS, National Geographic editors, producers and other creatives can easily locate any video based on the metadata available with Brightspot Media Desk and the CMS's powerful native search capabilities.
The outcome for National Geographic
With the help of Brightspot CMS and its Media Desk, National Geographic gained a crisp and modern front-end design and a powerful next-gen CMS to optimize back-end processing. By fully integrating with the existing OVP, Brightspot allowed National Geographic to further evolve its video products with additional page redesigns, enhanced player deployments and advanced advertising policies. Successful results included:
- Doubling of website traffic.
- Over 20,000 videos housed in the CMS, supported by real-time data synchronization with Comcast MPX OVP.
- Robust support for company-wide taxonomy of 50,000-plus terms, which significantly simplified and sped up editorial and development workflows by increasing content discoverability.
- The ability to showcase curated content easily with featured videos and editor’s picks sections on National Geographic's enhanced, fully responsive front end.
National Geographic in brief
