A Winning Experience for you and your friends. Win.Love-- the future of winning!
This is a concept I've been working on for years on the side. Could we get a younger audience interested in an experience that revolved around entering to win? What would it look like? Do we need a site? Should it be an app, a social media play or all of the above? After working closely with a group of 17 to 29 year old young men and women, I believe we achieved our goal. "Enter" the Win.Love. Win Big. Bring Friends concept.
A new mobile experience that dramtically increased all major KPIs
Traditionally, our first interaction with our customers was fairly involved and promoted a lengthy lineup of merchandise and cross promoted just about all of the various properties and content we had to offer. This new customer onboarding experience takes a significantly lighter approach. It immediately rewards customers by giving them 10X the number of entries they came for . We promote our very successful flagship PCH app , offer the customer a choice of which car they would prefer as a prize , give them their first token reward which they protect with a password . Key performance indicators for Conversion (+763%), Engagement (+344%), and Retention (7 Day +121%; 28 Day +81%.), were all dramatically improved.
PCH needed a big design upgrade!
In Q1 2023 Imet with a few of mycolleagues -- including our President of Media. It was time to startre-imagining all our user experiences. Our advertising team was having ahell-of-a-time selling with the current state of our web experience and ourability to attract a new, younger audience was being severely impacted.Unfortunately, redesigning the experience was a heavy lift, so we went to workand came back with the Weekly Grand Prize Experience. Using our significantprize budget, we added beautiful imagery, bold design, a new voice and alittle secret sauce.
The PCH Panel: 15 Million Americans Strong.
Market research plays a crucial role in gathering valuable data and insights, which are in high demand across various industries. A corner stone of Publishers Clearing House's strategy is to disrupt the market research industry using its direct relationship with its audience, driven by an incredible value proposition -- free-to-play, chance-to-win with over 170 million consumer interactions. I was tasked with quickly putting together a light Panel Book for PCH's Consumer Insights product. In addition to designing and animating this deck, I also wrote much of the copy. My presentation skills include the ability to visualize data. I am intimately familiar with presentation software but know how to take complex data/spreadsheets and turn them into beautiful info graphics, charts and more.
Presentation (PPT)
Presentation (PDF)
The impulse purchase and moving mindsets from dreams of winning to shopping to become a happy customer!
Getting people into the shopping state of mind when they visit you for completely different reasons is a challenge, but also and art, a science and a lot of phone. Over the years I've not only developed digital shopping experiences, but have created special offers, interactive devices and entirely new ways of shopping that turns a browser into a buyer.
Designed with love and pride
As a father of a Navy Veteran and part of a family with a legacy of service, it was an honor to have the opportuunity to design and re-imagine challenge coins. I was introduced to challenge coins by the father of fallen Marine, Cpl. Christopher Scherer. Through this devestating tragedy I met one of the greatest families I have ever known and since then, "whatever the Scherer's need from me, they will get," and this included designing and redesigning several challenge coins to honor our fallen military heroes. Several coins were in honor of his son Chris, who was felled by a single bullet from the gun of an enemy sniper in Anbar, Iraq. Other coins honored fallen military heroes like Navy Seal, Lt. Michael Murphy and Capt. Joseph J. Boccia Jr, USMC through the Suffolk Country Veterans Run Series Challenge Coin.
A Holiday Sponsorship Opportunity
Our sales team needed to make an impression when they met with Uber's Marketing Agency. Millions of dollars were at stake. I was tasked with developing the Uber Winning Experience. Here are just a few of the screens that landed the Uber and Uber Eats account.
A sweepstakes built for the Outdoorsman/Outdoorswoman
Remington was one of our biggest advertisers and they wanted 1P data. We put together a concept they just couldn't refuse. The Remington $10,000 Bucketlist Dream Hunt Sweeptakes was the answer. Not only were users able to choose from a great selection of dream hunts, they were also more than willing to share 1P infromation via a relevant and fun user experience. The value exchange was clear and readers were happy to share their answers. Vista Outdoors was also able to collect newsletter optins and a massive amount of traffic to their website via an exit to Remington.com.
Watch demo on Vimeo
We enable brands to connect with real people through the power of winning. Enter the new PCHmedia.com.
For most of 2022, the PCHmedia Executive Team spent our time establishing our brand guidelines, messaging, advertising solutions and getting our organization fortified with an all-new, top tier sales team. In Q1 of 2023, we launched our new website to match our high standards. Designed and built on Webflow®, the new PCHmedia.com will not only show what we do but ultimately become an invaluable resource for our partners. Plans include a Customer Success section where PCH Media customers can log in to custom Dashboards to see the results of their campaigns in real-time -- allowing us to make critical decisions to maximize success. In short time, PCHmedia will become a leading edge AdTech platform, and the backbone behind our many Advertising Solutions for brands.
What's better than playing games? Winning cash for playing games!
Download WordMania (iOS) WordMania (Android)
Rating: 4.7/4.6 Stars (iOS/Android)
Time In-App: 36 Mins
Annual Revenue: $12M and growing
DAUs: 30K
WordMania is the second in a series of "Mania" games my team and I conceived and developed for iOS and Android. We took a fun and addictive word game, added winning, a world-famous celebrity and turned it into a Multi-Million-Dollar/year app. The results were a hit with our board of directors, as well as our customers. Average in-app time ranks among the highest in the game category and 5 star ratings dominate both app stores. WordMania has been downloaded by over 100 million satisfied customers and features best-in-class ARPDAU for a free, ad-supported game.
An emmersive, live instant win experience.
We needed to capitalize on the live game show craze quickly. Our first inclination was to create our own live trivia game with a twist (I'll get to that below), but that was going to take some time. So instead we decided to start with a daily live cash drawing within our core app. Sure, we could have taken the simple route, but we wanted our experience to not only increase engagement and excite users, but also increase DAR. Enter "Cash Frenzy!" Each day, users would earn cash frenzy balls that could be saved, accumulated and thrown into the cash frenzy drawing at the end of the day. The live experience included a ball launcher that allowed the entrants to shoot their chances to win into the bouncing ball pit with all the other people in the drawing. At the end, the winners would be drawn and the cash could be claimed right then and there. All runner ups received tokens that could be redeemed in our redemption center for more chances to win.
See full demo here
From the minds of our newly created Innovation Lab
Remember the HQ Trivia app? This prompted us to create our new Innovation Lab. Myself and a select few others were asked by our board of directors to lead a new design-led lab that can quickly create new concepts, get them to market and fail fast. Our first crop of concepts included a live game show with in-studio, "Price is Right-style" gaming with real money winners, a live meme and trivia games -- all with realtime game play and immediately-awarded cash prizes. While all of these ideas were thoroughly fleshed out, the first Innovation Lab app would combine visual trivia, memes and real-time winning. We launched this concept in the iOS App Store under the name "WINcredible. The first app in our path to millions in revenue.
The Mob knows ... or do they?
One of the concepts that came out of our Innovation Lab may not have made it past the MVP stage, but we still have this ready-to-go and hope one day to bring this awesome idea to an App Store near you. Another "live game" concept, MTM featured several game mechanics similar to Family Feud in that it was not necessarily the right answer, but the most popular answer. But unlike the TV game show, users would play live, with each other and try to guess what everyone else would guess though classic, swipe, "would you rather", most popular and other fun mechanics and game styles. This made for some interesting scenarios ... and throw in real cash prizes ... who knows where the Mob could take this idea.
20 years and over $500 million in revenue!
In early 2002, I lead the development of white labeling FREELOTTO.com into what is now our own proprietary free lottery platform -- PCHlotto.com. Since then, PCHlotto has been a key contributor of high margin advertising revenue -- contributing over a half billion dollars in 20 years. The site and app features daily winners, a growing PowerPrize jackpot, a live Keno game every 20 minutes, exclusive state-by-state lotto cards, scratch-off games and more.
The evolution of the world's most famous sweeps app.
Download PCH+ (iOS) PCH+ (Android)
Rating: 4.6/4.5 Stars (iOS/Android)
Time In-App: 40 Mins
Annual Revenue: $30M and growing
DAUs: 75K
Early on, like most apps, the PCH app was essentially an App Store version of our mobile web experience. Many of the pages were web views and there was little in the way of rich native experiences, gamification or exclusive content. But after building an app development team in Boston, we launched our first native iOS app in 2013 which we built from the ground up. Eventually, the PCH app included new, exclusive features like 10X entries (only in the app), Tokens (a new currency my team and I developed that allowed customers to accrue a currency for more chances to win), Levels (higher levels = higher winnings), Daily streaks (the more you visit the more you can win), Treasure chests (unlocked at certain levels and achievements), a Daily Prizes UI/UX (a special welcome experience with entry multipliers for every mission completed), Live events (a live game/winner announcement every day at 4PM) and more.
Immersive 3D Worlds.
A major part of the PCH+ app experience are the richly detailed worlds users explore to unlock entries for prizes and tokens rewards. Take-a-look at early renderings of the PCH+ World, some partner themed worlds and an animated "flyover" of a few of the worlds we created.
PCHmedia's new identity needed to stand out – be bold even.
Publishers Clearing House needed to re-brand our B2B operating unit's visual identity, brand guidelines, messaging and corresponding marketing material including website, presentation templates, etc. PCH Media is powered by the significantly sized, permission-based audience first-party gated data and marketing experience that PCH has built up over the past 60 years. As the parent brand to IDentifi and other future products and solutions, the PCH Media visual brand needed to be related to IDentifi. There will be a family of products and solutions and we needed to think carefully about how new (and currently unnamed) ones will be designed. The PCHmedia brand needed to stand out – be bold even, but still communicate the strategic nature of the business.
RELATED:
PCHmedia Brand Guidelines
A unique solution for an everyday need.
Skape® is an app that directly connects homeowners to a population of landscapers that can view, quote, and bid on jobs in-app in much the same way Uber connects those needing a ride to drivers. The easy-to-use Skape® app features a property outlining tool for easy price modeling -- along with functionality that allows homeowners to upload pictures of their property to give "Skapers" a mobile view of the job request so they can make an informed decision to accept the job without having to figure out pricing -- saving time and money. Pricing for the homeowner is instantly generated and based on a host of dynamic variables including market, time-of-year, property size, services requested and more. As a founding member of Skape® my role is as an Advisory Board Member working closely with a team of co-founders, investors and developers from Columbia University.
Visual identity, Messaging and Go-To-Market Strategy.
The Publishers Clearing House (since 1953) and Wide Open Media (acquired in 2020) platforms deliver 100% permission-based first-party customer data that allow brands and publishers to shape strategies, grow their brands and drive sales. In 2021, our executive team decided to spin-off our advertising business into a new operating unit and I was asked to lead the development of its visual identity, messaging and go-to-market material and strategy. In Q1 of 2022, the new branding and messaging for this new identity and activation platform for brands and publishers was finalized -- IDentifi: The power of know.
RELATED:
IDentifi Brand Guidlines
