Blowfish Studios (uncredited) Scholastic of America
Virtual Book Fair (2020)
Senior Producer (feature and live support) and Multimedia Designer
Client-facing production and multimedia design responsibilities including facilitation of art and feature requests, coordinating with various technical and nontechnical departments within Scholastic (Fairs, Online Store, and Technical Services Teams), research and setup of the system within Pano2VR, and setting up and rolling out build, upload, and project archival systems.
This non-game project took me back to my Multimedia Design Bachelor roots: jumping in to a new tool and pushing it to its limit and beyond. The focus may not have been on gameplay experience, but instead the overall user flow experience, as the project needed to be appealing and accessible to teachers, parents, and kids. Each subsequent update took into account user feedback as well as feature requests from the client.
I worked on this project from its inception in July 2020, through its release in September 2020, until June 2021. The project was a finalist in the Shorty Awards for the category “Digital Pivot.”
To highlight its success, here is the “Results” section of the Shorty Awards profile page:
Primarily, despite school closures having a heavy impact on bookings of in-person book fairs, the 360° experience enticed tens of thousands of schools to host a truly virtual fair, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue.
In the first 3 months alone, the experience averaged over 40% of the traffic for all book fair purchases—and traffic remained fairly consistent for the entire school year, driving far more direct purchases than anticipated.
Supporting promotion included a Virtual Fair Promotion Guide—a step-by-step primer on hosting a successful virtual fair tailored to our Book Fair Chairs (lead school volunteer); this was viewed 42,000 times throughout the year. We also ramped up our paid digital efforts, including a social campaign directed to parents with active fairs that garnered high revenue numbers and resulted in a 309% ROAS. In addition, we sent emails directly to our Chairs with ready-to-go tips to promote the fair to their school communities. These emails saw a 56% unique open rate and 16% unique click rate, over 120% above industry average.
Since launch in October 2020, the 360° virtual book fair has received over 2.8M views.
Ellen Jurik 