Case Study: Wendy's Sports Zone

Wendy's and MacLaren Momentum wanted to drive traffic to their Montreal area stores by creating a sports-themed promotion focused primarily at young males.

METROPOLIS created the Wendy's Sports Zone, that would allow teams to create a 'web-site' for their sports teams. Participants could upload photos, enter team mates, manage their schedules and send messages to their team mates. Registered teams were also entered into the Team of the Week contest to win a $ 1,000 gift certificate and inclusion in a television spot.

Team Management Features & Functions

There are a number of ‘off-the-shelf’ team-management CMS applications available, but none of them were quite right for Wendy’s purposes. So METROPOLIS integrated some of the best features and functions into a customized, cohesive application that was packaged as a Wendy’s-branded interface, and drove users to Wendy’s locations.

Sports teams were able to utilize the following features and functions:

Manage Roster with hierarchal permissions for team ‘captains’, members, and ‘fans’
Image Gallery to upload, display and distribute team logo and photos
Stats Package to manage league, team and individual player statistics and results, customized packages for baseball, hockey and soccer.
Calendar to schedule games, practices and other events, with automated reminders
Message Board to post messages to team members and/or fans, e-mail distribution to team-mates.

Home Page

Trivia Challenge

Team of the Week

Bilingual Site Architecture

Not only was the site developed with a parallel site architecture, WendysSportsZone.ca and ZoneSportifWendys.ca, but METROPOLIS also allowed for the fact that a given Team might have a default language preference that was different from a team members’ preference, which might have been different from a users’ language preference.

This content included instructions and default content, buttons and error messages, as well as user-generated content on the team pages themselves.

Using session IPs, database scripting, and thoughtful site architecture, we were able to build the site so that the appropriate language was always provided according to the users’ preference.

Additional Features, Functions & Widgets

We developed a number of other interesting features, functions and widgets:

Canadian-Themed Sports Trivia Game METROPOLIS sourced the trivia questions, managed translation, and coded the game to allow players to record their results and challenge their friends.
Store Locator Users were encouraged to Invite a Friend for a Burger. The site would locate their nearest Wendy’s location, e-mail an invitation to a friend, and allow the friend to confirm or suggest the time and location.
Potty-mouth detector All parties were understandably concerned about unmonitored user-generated-content appearing on the site, so we coded a script that would prevent questionable language – in French and English – from being uploaded to the site. We also created a process that would expedite user concerns about questionable content so they could be reviewed and resolved quickly.
Team of the Week The program included a contest that would highlight a team who would be showcased on TSN and win a $1,000 sports equipment package.
Message Board Post messages to team members and/or fans, e-mail distribution to team mates.