Immediate Media is a special interest content and platform company engaging over 75 million passionate global consumers each month, offering world-class content across various brands.
The media industry is transforming from ad to subscription based revenue models. Immediate Media believed that a mobile app would engage their consumers, as they could deliver more curated content with a premium feel. Offering these together, customers would choose to subscribe. The company wanted to find a smart and pragmatic approach to not build multiple apps from scratch, and also not fall into the trap of creating a single, generic app for all of their brands.
Our challenge was to produce a pragmatic solution: one which could be easily replicated for multiple brands, but also allowed each brand to remain unique in how they displayed content. Using our mobile expertise, we created a white-label-esque mobile application containing preempted, basic modules of functionality, which could be modified to provide a bespoke feel.
Theodo’s methodology, which combines Lean, DevOps and Scrum, allowed Immediate Media to strategise, build and ship at speed. As a result of our regular-problem solving, we could uncover and mitigate where dependencies would reside in a large, matrix organisation to alleviate blockers and foresee risks. This was key when navigating through Immediate’s existing backend services, and ensuring all departments were aligned on the product vision via regular user testing, clear visibility, and discussions.
We applied our previous white-label expertise, constructed a clean, React Native architecture for our code base, and built vigorous in-app tests. This future-proofed the application to ensure Immediate Media could develop a stable collection of apps, and introduce brand-specific features smoothly for each target audience.
Leveraging the white-label/monorepo (more below) approach, we completely rebuilt Immediate’s original BBC Good Food app, and transformed the previous high crash rates to below 1%. Within a month of release, it was featured in Apple’s App of the Day, after providing the premium UX the original mission aimed to achieve.
See our award-winning apps here: BBC Good Food and History Extra.
We used continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) to regularly validate features with users, and to allow quick product iterations to deliver the best customer experience. This was made easier by reducing the internal app complexity, which handled the data fetching logic and business logic in a Backend For Frontend. In addition, we conducted a kaizen, which improved the navigation speed between screens by removing unnecessary re-renders.
Our configuration-based approach enabled us to regenerate and replicate the base app without needing to recreate existing parts. The adjustable homepage widgets and smart card components built into the app ensured brands could tailor their user experience to tablets and multiple layouts conveniently and efficiently.
"Theodo allowed Immediate Media to hit the ground running and have been fantastic. We couldn't have moved at the speed we did without them. I looked forward to my daily interactions with the Product team, as they were always productive and good fun!"
