unleashing the power of ai and jennifer lopez in a memorable virgin voyages project

We researched a few CDNs and high-performance web hosts and settled on Netlify. Again something we’ve used and relied on before, but also something which fits the needs of the project very well. Asset storage and CDN was offloaded to Google Cloud Storage. This can then be easily managed by other stakeholders who are in charge of the final asset production.

After some team brainstorming we settled on a flat build approach using Assemble.io. Something we’ve used before and we are familiar with, tried and tested, so we knew we could get a prototype up and running in no time. We configured this through grunt.js and implemented browsersync to speed up the dev loop.

We got to work right away tackling the critical elements of the web build first, building out a custom framework capable of playing a video slideshow, with custom transition and user controls.

From here we could break out the custom components the design would require us to build, and start piecing together the components within the slideshow framework.

At this point, we had a functional prototype and we could begin to implement the various APIs into the flow to generate the generated audio and video elements.

Finally, we dropped the production assets in place and performed our meticulous QA process.

Final checks were performed across the product, including Google Analytics event specification checking – every meaningful user interaction is tracked to ensure reports can be provided later to indicate the success of the project.

We launched the project on a bespoke domain name to mitigate some risk. (Rather than a subdirectory or subdomain of the main Virgin Voyages website.) This approach also allows us to stage the final project on the final URL, behind a password. Netlify allows us to manage authentication very easily through their impressive dashboard.

The project has been a huge success. Taking over the homepage of virginvoyages.com at launch and also being mailshot out to all of Virgin Voyages customers. So far we’ve seen thousands of bespoke AI videos generated and also many thousands of voyage invites sent.