Products

I’ve delivered a variety of B2C and B2B products to market — from loyalty programs and online games, to SaaS solutions for small businesses, to location-based mobile apps. Here is a gallery of the more visually interesting products.

Savery – mobile app (iOS, Android)

Description: Location-based mobile app with relevant, nearby offers displayed on a beautiful map interface with you at its heart.

Audience: Imagitas helps the United States Postal Service facilitate the official change of address for 35 million movers every year and enables marketers to distribute relevant offers to this valuable audience. Savery enables movers to bring their valuable coupons everywhere — no more clipping, losing or forgetting. Benefits to the partner include driving targeted foot traffic to retail store locations resulting in increased basket size and higher redemption rates.

Key Features:

• Valuable offers on your phone – never miss, lose or forget a special offer again
• Geo-monitoring to drive in-store redemption
• Smart notifications to drive in-store redemption
• Easily redeem offers right from device
• Additional offers based on mover’s actual location

Results:

• Enhanced retail demand channel with new digital capabilities.
• Piloted concierge app with conversational UI, creating new engagement and monetization opportunities.

Gamesville – Web

Description: Advertising-supported and subscription-based online game shows, played in realtime against other people for real cash and other prizes.

Audience: Primarily a female audience, ages 18-45, interested in fun, breezy interactive entertainment in a congenial, social atmosphere.

Key Features:

• Large arena game engine allows thousands of players to compete in realtime, simultaneously, for high scores and real prizes
• Gamesville offers unique sponsorship opportunities in which sponsors become deeply, directly associated and embedded in the site’s activities
• Monetization via preroll video ads, interstitials, midroll video ads, in-game sponsorships, and premium subscriptions
• Prize fulfillment with API integration with USPS to verify prize winner’s mailing address deliverability
• Prizing, banking and avatar system

Results:

• Increased Gamesville.com media revenue YOY for five consecutive years.
• Profitably expanded development team from 1 full-time employee to 13 FTEs.
• Produced viral timewaster “Poke The Penguin”, notably increasing new unique visitors.

Scantopia – mobile app (iOS, Android)

Description: Rewards consumers with real cash and zany prizes just for scanning UPC codes. The products consumers scan says a lot about them, and Scantopia and its marketing partners use this information to help Scantopia’s rapidly growing audience save on the brands they adore as well as discover exciting, new brands to try.

Audience: Primarily a female audience, ages 18-45, interested in coupons and sweepstakes, responsible for major purchase decisions within the household.

Key Features:

• Win cash rewards or tokens for each UPC scanned
• Use tokens to enter weekly and monthly drawings
• As players scan barcodes, the Weekly Progressive Jackpot grows to a maximum of $1,000
• Scantopia’s monthly Weird Sweeps reward winners with zany prizes like five miles of toilet paper* or enormous gummy worms
• Daily Super Scans that reward players with a guaranteed cash prize for being among the first to scan featured daily products
• The more items players scan, the smarter the application becomes and the rewards – including coupons – become tailored to users’ individual preferences

Results:

• Exceeded growth targets while optimizing user acquisition costs by driving online marketing on Facebook.
• Optimized app for positive user reviews on Google Play and iTunes while successfully reducing in-app fraud.

Weather Zombie – Web, Mobile (iOS)

Description: Combines comedic zombies with serious weather information. Weather forecasts provided via API from AccuWeather. Deployed as desktop website, native iOS app, and mobile-optimized site for Android devices.

Audience: Weather impacts everyone — including the 25 million unique visitors to the Lycos Network. With its unique spin on weather, Weather Zombie provides a fun, data-rich experience to users in a free, advertising-supported environment.

Key Features:

• Monstrously handsome zombie forecasters and zombified weather icons
• Location detection by GPS or internet connection
• Current, 12 Hour and 7 Day forecasts
• Radar for the United States and most of Canada
• Comics staring the Weather Zombies & various cloud formations
• English and Metric data measurements

Results:

• Positive reviews on high profile tech sites such as The Next Web, Make Use Of, and Programmable Web.

Lycos Cinema – Web

Description: Proprietary video platform brings full-length movies together with real-time chat for an interactive, real-time, synchronized user-driven video viewing experience. Hybrid monetization model featuring both ad-supported content and premium content available on a rental basis.

Audience: Threefold: 1) Consumer audience is genre movie lovers, 18-35. 2) Partners are film studios and independent filmmakers seeking to monetize existing content, build social media presence, or host online screenings with live chat and feedback. 3) Advertisers are CPGs and others seeking to target customers by demographic and behavioral data.

Key Features:

• Multiple viewers can watch the same, synchronized video while chatting and interacting
• Viewing sessions can be scheduled and made either public or private
• Business model supports free ad-supported content as well as premium content
• For premium content, hosts can purchases seats for friends or the general public ($6 to rent for up to 5 people, and $8 for up to 10 people)

Results:

• Positive press for Lycos as an innovator in video on tech sites such as Mashable, CNET, and TechCrunch

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*Bonus Factoids

Calculating five miles of toilet paper

When the idea came up of giving away “five miles of toilet paper” as a sweepstakes prize in Scantopia, it was my duty as the Product Operations Prize Guru to calculate exactly how much toilet paper that would be and how much it would cost us.

Here are some fun facts I discovered about toilet paper:

• A standard sheet of toilet paper is 4.5 inches by 4.5 inches according to The Toilet Paper Encyclopedia. The average size of a square is actually shrinking as manufacturers seek to cut corners, but I used the standard size to my calculations.
• One mile is equal to 63,360 inches.
• Which means there are 14,080 standard squares of toilet paper in a mile.

Once I understood this, I had to select the right brand of toilet paper. The major players in the US were Kimberly Clark, Georgia-Pacific, Marcal, and Procter & Gamble. At the time, Quilted Northern Ultra Plush by Georgia-Pacific was one of the top-selling brands on the market.

A roll of Quilted Northern Ultra Plush has 176 sheets, which is equal to 80 rolls per mile at the standard sheet size. Five miles would equal 400 rolls. Quilted Northern Ultra Plush was sold in 96-count packages so, rounding up, we’d need five of those packages. At $179.99 apiece, the cost came to $899.95 plus shipping.

Other unique prize calculations I made at Scantopia: a year’s worth of organic honey; new shoes for an entire family for an entire year; and a swimming pool’s worth of dish detergent.