Buchanan's Forever (The Edge - 2008)

Client: Buchanan's (Diageo)

Buchanan's Forever (2008/2009) was a series of music events held in Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia. The events celebrated the enduring relationship between Buchanan's (Scotch whisky) and Latin American consumers by creating premium music experiences while highlighting the brands investment in local charity programmes. The events are supported by a website which acted as a central communications channel and allowed Buchanan's to develop direct relationships with consumers. The headline act was Elton John with James Blunt supporting.

As Senior Producer, I was responsible for development and delivery of the website. This project involved a number of challenges including the following:

• Language - the site needed to be delivered in Spanish, so much of the content was produced in English first and then translated. The timing of translation and development was therefore carefully coordinated. As with all foreign language websites produced by English speakers, this process is further complicated by graphical assets containing the target language.
• Localisation - each country needed a slightly different version of the website to accommodate local content. This added to the overall complexity of the website.
• 3rd parties - the development was a collaborative effort and responsibilities broke down as follows:
  • The Edge - responsible for overall project management, creative vision, creative assets, documentation, content, testing, event production, artists liaison etc
  • Accenture - programming and hosting
  • Wunderman - local agency in Latin America responsible for translating and localising content, content population, competition management and email deployment
  • Global Vision - South African company responsible for Diageo database development and data management
  • Diageo - clients including Diageo project manager
• Diageo guidelines - Diageo has extensive digital guidelines and processes which have to be complied with. This complicates the project and extends the timeline.

As the project manager, my responsibilities included:

• Budget forecasting and management
• Project scoping, planning and specification
• Scheduling and timeline management
• Creation and approval of project documentation, eg technical specs, sitemaps, wireframes, copy decks etc
• Information architecture (in this case I acted as the IA)
• Resource planning and coordination - developers, designers, copywriters, freelances etc
• Brainstorm and creative process management
• Client liaison and expectation management
• Change and risk management
• Management of third party relationships