Say Media was born after VideoEgg, an advertising technology company, purchased Six Apart, the maker of blogging platforms LiveJournal, MovableType, and TypePad. Say Media developed their own proprietary publishing platform with custom advertising technology solutions. They also acquired several digital publishers and partnered with several others to have their content hosted on their publishing platform. The business was built on integrating ad units across these properties and having the ability to sell remnant ad space that publishers weren't able to sell themselves.
My Role
I joined Say Media in September 2013 to help design the UI of their proprietary CMS, Tempest. At the time I joined, Say Media had just released the MVP of their Tempest Publishing Platform with a single media property, ReadWrite. I paired with a UX Designer and collaborated with Front-end Developers on the Engineering team to define the baseline experience of Tempest and implement variant-based features that would allow different media brands to join the platform and distinguish themselves without compromising the core codebase.
While at Say Media I helped on-board the first 25 publishers onto the Tempest Platform, frequently meeting with them to implement their brands and collect feedback on how they wanted to customize their experience on Tempest.
Tempest Publishing Platform
Tempest was the publishing platform that Say Media built from the ground up. It had both an Editor-facing CMS and consumer-facing front-end for readers to read published articles. Multiple publishers used the Tempest Platform to publish and host content for their media brands. The platform came with advanced advertising technology that was able to display standard IAB banner ads and also more engaging custom-designed ad units with the ability to leverage video.
For my part I helped to define the skinning logic of the codebase, meaning I identified where different fonts, hex colors, and custom graphics can be implemented to distinguish brands apart from each other on the platform without any architectural changes to the core code. In future iterations we offered alternative design variants of story cards to allow publishers to create different layouts. Most importantly we had to apply a consistent positioning of ad units across all media properties to support ad sales and ad reporting metrics. We had well-known brands eventually join the platform such as Biography.com, Rachael Ray, and Lifetime.
Say Quarterly
A couple times per year Say Media would produce a one-off experience demonstrating storytelling capabilities that were being considrered for the Tempest Platform. It was almost like a concept car for what may come on Tempest.
Say Quarterly included thought leadership pieces and advertiser Case Studies. I worked on Issue 7 of the Say Quarterly, designing several pages of the experience proposing interactive components to make the stories more dynamic. These also served as prototypes for features we could integrate into Tempest.