MRY
When I started working at MRY it was called LBi. LBi was one of the largest agencies in the world, with most of its business in Europe. Outside of Europe, the agency had an office in New York and Atlanta. I went to LBi in the hope of working on large global initiatives. My arrival at the agency occured right after LBi won Coca-Cola's global campaign for the 2012 London Olympics.
I was a Technical Director leading a development team with staff in Atlanta and New York. Being a remote leader had its complications, but I earned the team's respect on the Olympics campaign by working extremely hard and making smart decisions to help guide the project through shifting demands that would arise as each individual Coca-Cola market (from the USA to Nigeria) imparted their own requirements on the campaign. The site allowed users to create personalized music videos using images from Facebook. The engagement was strong: tens of thousands of personalized videos were created. I had the pleasure of seeing the URL to our site featured twice in Coke advertisements aired during the opening ceremonies.
The successful Olympics campaign begat more work between LBi and Coca-Cola in partnership with Spotify. In 2012 Coke invested $10 million in Spotify and the two companies made an arrangement to execute some kind of co-branded marketing effort. In mid-2012, Coke, LBi, Spotify and Facebook all got together for a couple of weeks at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters to figure out what all of us could do together to create a thing that Coke and Spotify could champion for their new partnership. Facebook hosted all of us as part of their "Shipyard" program. Shipyard embedded large brands and agency development teams at Facebook's campus for two weeks to build a brand new (minimum viable) product from scratch. We had a large room where we did our work and various Facebookers would drop in throughout the engagement to share their thoughts.
Out of Shipyard, Placelists was born. Users could "tune into" a location that had a Facebook place page and add songs to that place. These songs could be voted on by other users to create a collaboratively generated playlist for that place - a "Placelist." At the time, Spotify's player supported third-party apps. Placelist songs were played in the Spotify player and lists were generated and manipulated through the player or through a responsive mobile web site.
What we delivered out of our Shipyard stint was a functional proof of concept, but not quite Minimum Viable Product. It was a little too rough and we had more work to do. I recruited an extremely talented JavaScript developer into the agency just in time for Shipyard. His first day on the job had him flying out to Menlo Park. The two of us worked closely with our team in New York after Shipyard to move the app through an alpha version and then into a beta. This journey would take us to Stockholm, Spotify's headquarters, for two weeks while we worked with their teams to tighten up the application. The final Placelists iteration would be written in backbone.js, modules were managed with require.js, and everything was packaged with Grunt. With Placelists, I had transitioned into a full stack developer writing a thick-client JavaScript application along with its supporting APIs and data services.
Placelists was the vessel for Coke and Spotify's co-branded marketing effort. Both companies got some good PR and Spotify got their logo, paired with a link to Placelists, on Coca-Cola cans in Europe. Spotify eventually ended support for 3rd-party applications in their player, thus ending Placelists. However, Placelists made it back into the news when Spotify went public in April 2018 and media attention returned to Coke's 2012 investment in Spotify.