AGC Glascene Product Launch: A Formula for a Beautiful Microsite Delivered Quickly and Efficiently Using a Premium Drupal 8 Theme

About the Client

AGC Business Development Americas, Inc. (ABDA) is a Silicon Valley based US group of Asahi Glass Co., Ltd (AGC), the world’s largest glass-based chemical material company.

As a solution provider, the AGC Group supplies building, automotive, and display glass, electronic materials, chemical products, ceramics, and other high-performance materials to customers around the world.

Objectives

Webdrips was approached by the client with the following objectives:

• Create and launch an engaging web presence (microsite) to provide product information for a product launch of a new glass product called Glascene. Glascene was to be featured at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) expo event, so the timeline was fixed at just under one month.
• Create a digital viral campaign for the product launch of Glascene through email marketing, social media, and publishing information about the AWE endorsement event.
• Configure a strong foundation for long term digital strategy of the Glascene website to serve as a model for future microsites and product launches.
• Provide all of the website content, and the media for much of the example applications. 
• Implement content for SEO performance and drive organic traffic for the product and launch event.
• Implement a fully responsive, cross-device design (Drupal theme) while staying on budget.
• Implement tracking of key performance metrics.

Strategy & Design Concepts

AGC has a reputation for their best in class products and technology, so it was important to keep within their brand guidelines and stay true to the concept of the product. Although AGC already launched the Glascene product in their overseas markets, such as Japan and Italy, the difficulty with entering the US market was the lack of creative assets, and a very short turnaround time for project completion (which was driven by the conference date).

Because the product was in the visual technology space, we needed to create a website that could visually convey exactly what Glascene could do, and its potential applications. The use of media and creative assets were needed to connect to AGC's clients emotionally using eye-catching imagery, site layout, and media-rich video.

ABDA provided Webdrips with some collateral for use in the project as a start. From there, and with some high level direction from the AGC team, we planned the digital marketing support and development for the campaign launch, including a marketing plan, art direction, marketing collateral creation and editing, UX design, microsite development, email template, content creation, product messaging, and KPI tracking.

Implementation: the Microsite was Built on Drupal 8 with a Premium Drupal Theme

We knew the project deadline and budget were both a bit tight, so we decided Drupal 8 with a premium responsive theme would be the best approach for both.

Using Drupal 8 as the responsive CMS, Webdrips implemented or provided the following:

1. New mobile-ready website with five major sections: the homepage, about the product, applications, events, and contact
2. Website hosting
3. Media assets, including background video for the homepage, videos of the product in use, and photos highlighting the product's many applications
4. All of the website's content and SEO strategy
5. A targeted event-based email campaign.

Because of the tight timeline and lack of creative assets, the approach was to create the site's architecture, design, and content writing all in parallel.

To help reduce the design time while keeping on budget, we purchased a premium Drupal theme called Corporate+. We then had our design team tweak the base theme and finalize the design, while the architecture team completed the development, and our marketing team pieced together the content and media.

Bringing it all Together for Launch

The ABDA Glascene microsite was a completely new and rich-media asset for the organization. The website accomplished product launch and event announcement project goals. It visually displayed the power and beauty of the product clearly and concisely using content and creative assets. The microsite also provided information about the product’s features, specifications, and potential applications in different target markets. A very simple navigation design was deployed for potential clients to quickly find product information and event information.

As the website was being wrapped up, we set up the highly-target email launch campaign to reach the desired organizations. The emails were personal invitations to the launch event, and resulted in a highly successful engagement.

The result of the intense four week Drupal 8 digital marketing and web product launch project was a very happy client with their microsite delivered on time and on budget, while accomplishing the project goals of the organization. We were able to do this thanks to our design, development, and marketing teams all being able to work in parallel using an Agile project process and following our formula for new sites launches.

ABDA was pleased with the outcome:

We challenged the Webdrips team with a very abstract charter, but that didn't phase them whatsoever. On the contrary, their intuition and experience gave us instant confidence that we had chosen the right partner. Webdrips not only built an outstanding digital footprint and campaign microsite, but their use of creative assets was an important contribution to the overall marketing campaign for the Glascene platform (a novel transparent glass projection screen).

They over-delivered, on-time and at budget.

-Tom Trill, President, AGC Business Development Americas

Why Drupal 8?

We knew Drupal 8 provided many new built-in features, and a vastly improved authoring environment. After finding a beautiful premium theme, we knew without a doubt Drupal 8 was the right choice for the client.

What's important to note here is the following:

1. The premium Corporate+ Drupal theme was incredibly valuable, and provided a tremendous "head start" to meeting the four-week deadline. We can't overstate how much time it saved our design team, and we wouldn't have been able to complete such a beautiful website in time without purchasing this theme for around $50.
2. The Drupal 8 core architecture and free contributed modules provided additional time savings both by providing drop-in functionality, and we didn't find ourselves fighting the platform.
3. If the client wishes to add additional microsites in the future, the cost per microsite will drop significantly now that a base design and architecture are in place.