"Damien possesses the true qualities of a project manager. He listens to his clients while maintaining the overall project vision. I truly appreciated his responsiveness and his ability to translate our functional needs into high-quality digital products.”
Joseph Soares
ex Head of Client Services, AFP
Context & Objectives
While at the digital agency Megalo(s), I had the opportunity to combine my professional expertise with my personal passion for sports by overseeing the digital production for AFP, the world's third-largest global press agency. The objective was to design and develop a new generation of interactive sports products capable of broadcasting real-time sports information to clients worldwide.
My role was to manage the technical and creative production using a comprehensive B2B2C product design methodology. The main objectives were to:
- Unify the Architecture: Design a common technical foundation for all sports applications, encompassing football, Formula 1, cycling, and rugby.
- Optimize Costs & Integration: Rationalize the creation and maintenance costs of new applications. Additionally, the goal was to ensure the modules could seamlessly integrate into client websites (matching sizes and colors) while valuing the client's advertising spaces.
- Target the Right Audience: Create an interface validated by user testing, specifically tailored to the core demographic of men aged 35 to 49 in upper socio-professional categories (CSP+).
Results & Impact
The production was a major technical and strategic success, providing AFP with a highly scalable, multi-sport digital ecosystem. Key achievements included:
- Massive Global Reach: The interactive applications were successfully deployed by AFP's media clients across 33 different countries.
- Extensive Localization: To support this massive global distribution, the modules were developed in 48 languages. This included implementing UTF-8 technology to ensure flawless compatibility with complex character sets, such as Asian and Cyrillic alphabets.
- Broad Sports Coverage: The ecosystem successfully powered the coverage of major international events and leagues, including top European football leagues, the Copa America, the UEFA Euro, the Rugby World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Formula 1 World Championship.
- Technical Scalability & Efficiency: We delivered a robust Model View Controller (MVC) architecture, allowing different sports views to run on the same core intelligence. Coupled with a dedicated administration tool, this enabled AFP to effortlessly build and deploy customized applications by aggregating different views.
