

Like many of Viacom’s channels, Nickelodeon’s calendar is geared around seasons and tentpole, multi-platform events. The biggest is Kids Choice Awards, a global awards format driven by fan voting that is one of the biggest entertainment moments of the year - a cultural phenomenon.
With the ongoing threat posed to all linear TV channels, and with ad dollars moving to digital platforms, Nickelodeon has always been ahead of the game in creating modern, interactive experiences that feel relevant to kids. Continuing to engage and interact with the audience on digital platforms is a key part of the business strategy, as a way to continue being a household favourite and competing for brand investment via advertising and sponsorship.
With the existing success and profile of Kids Choice Awards, Kids Choice Sports Awards, Trivia Prizefest and other tentpole interactive events, the Nickelodeon team wanted to supercharge their capabilities.
The team had proven that real-time companion experiences could enhance TV experience - getting kids to vote and play along with event television was becoming a growing component to their strategy.
With frustration building around their existing, highly bespoke solution, they went on a hunt for a better platform solution. Rather than building bespoke, costly and hard-to-maintain software, they were looking for a single platform to power high volume voting, play-along and companion experiences that could be rolled out quickly and reliably at scale; integrated with their existing tech stack and complying with the sensitivities of COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
As part of a competitive and analytical process, Monterosa was selected to provide the solution, based on the Monterosa / Interaction Cloud™.
The Nickelodeon team rapidly adopted Monterosa / Interaction Cloud™ and its flexible FanKit web app.
Within weeks, Nickelodeon were fully set up on the platform with their design skins and integrations ready. As with most larger organisations, ensuring compatibility with existing tech stack is essential: using existing APIs we integrated with ad serving, analytics, TV graphics and video.
Once setup, the keys to Monterosa / Studio were handed over to Nickelodeon’s Creators. They loved it.
By setting up and pushing out tailored ‘Elements’, the team were able to operate secure voting, live companion experiences, sweepstakes and play-along games with ease, coming back to Monterosa only when a new integration or design skin was required.
The live votes pulled in 33MM votes this year, in addition to 2MM trivia submissions and over 200k memes created during the show
208k memes created, +20% vs last year
85k memes downloaded, +193% vs last year
Powered by Monterosa / Interaction Cloud™ and with the expertise of our Gamification team, the Screens Up app was relaunched to include a system of points and medals collection
Eagle-eyed viewers get the chance to ‘catch’ QR codes appearing in randomised areas of the TV screen, and then max out their points by proving how closely they’ve been watching and answering an episode-specific question
As points accumulate, they earn and level up their medals, giving them bragging rights among friends and family and rewarding them for their viewership
A key decision in awarding Monterosa the contract was the ability for the Nickelodeon team to be able to set up and manage their interactive experiences and make changes at speed
M/IC and the Studio delivers the control and agileness that the Nick team demand to be able to interact with their audiences
Together with Nickelodeon we have transformed how digital and linear come together to engage kids across America. Through a flexible product approach that includes native apps and HTML5 experiences all configured and managed via the M/IC Studio Monterosa delivers a consistent set of backend tools, combined with our real-time platform and reliability levels to enable Nickelodeon to deploy extremely high quality experience for kids with short deliver times.
The studio powered by Monterosa / Interaction Cloud™ has a variety of ready-to-go experiences you can deploy in just a few clicks, at scale and in real-time
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