Capital One

Case Study

Planning a 16-Week Digital Competition

Capital One’s 2013 Mascot Challenge was not a site that could simply launch and be considered finished. It was a season-long digital competition connecting 16 college mascots, weekly matchups, voting, social participation, user-generated content, statistics, playoffs, and an active college football fan base.

The 2013 program expanded the traditional voting model by giving fans multiple ways to support their mascots. A standard vote was worth one point, social participation could earn 25 points, and larger photo or video challenges could earn 100 points. Those mechanics turned the experience into something more dynamic than a conventional voting site and made planning how the product would operate throughout the competition especially important.

I was a Senior Interactive Developer and one of the primary developers responsible for turning those campaign mechanics into a working digital product. My involvement extended well beyond implementation. I participated in stakeholder and planning discussions, helped determine how the experience would be developed and produced, and remained involved from architecture and development through remediation, QA, launch, and live operations.

Turning Campaign Mechanics Into a Product

Weekly challenges, scoring, voting, social hashtags, UGC, matchup data, and statistics all had to become understandable product behaviors that fans could use across mobile, tablet, and desktop.

I was directly involved in translating those requirements into the experience. That meant thinking beyond individual pages and considering how the competition functioned as a system: how fans moved between matchups, how weekly content changed, how statistics were presented, how social participation connected to scoring, and how interaction and motion could make a data-driven competition feel energetic without getting in the way of participation.

I also established much of the interaction and animation direction throughout the site. Those decisions were closely connected to the campaign mechanics. Motion and interaction needed to reinforce hierarchy, state changes, competition, and fan participation rather than exist simply as decoration.

Architecting & Co-Developing the Experience

I co-developed nearly the entire frontend application, receiving help from other developers on specific pages while taking substantial ownership of the overall responsive experience and its technical direction.

I helped define the custom frontend MVC architecture and the way the application communicated with the backend. Although I was not responsible for developing the PHP and MySQL backend, I worked directly with the backend developer to define API payload structures that could support contest data, weekly states, statistics, and the information required by the frontend.

The result was a frontend designed around a campaign that was expected to change continuously. Rather than treating every week as an isolated update, the application needed a structure capable of consuming changing data and presenting new matchups, content, challenges, and results throughout the competition.

That architectural work is important to how I look back on the project. My title was Senior Interactive Developer, but I was increasingly thinking about the entire system: what the campaign required, how data needed to move through it, how people would interact with it, and how the development approach could support months of active operation.

Accessibility & Pre-Launch Remediation

Building the experience was only part of getting it ready for a major corporate launch. Before the competition went live, accessibility testing and remediation became a significant part of my responsibility.

I worked through multiple accessibility scans and the issues they surfaced, remediating the frontend and retesting as we moved toward release. This was a highly visible corporate experience with an aggressive schedule, so accessibility concerns had to be addressed alongside functional QA, interaction behavior, responsive presentation, campaign requirements, and the realities of an approaching launch date.

The challenge was not simply resolving individual findings. We needed to preserve the intent and functionality of a highly interactive experience while making the changes required to move it toward production readiness.

That work reinforced an important distinction that would become increasingly central to my career: development and delivery are not the same thing. A product can be functionally complete and still not be ready to launch. Accessibility, QA, stakeholder requirements, remediation, production readiness, and operational support are all part of delivering the product successfully.

Production Readiness

As launch approached, planning, development, remediation, and QA converged. I participated throughout the process, working through issues and validating the experience while continuing to coordinate with stakeholders and the broader project team.

That production planning was a significant part of the engagement for me. We were preparing a product that had to support an active competition rather than a fixed campaign moment. Weekly content, scoring, social activity, UGC, statistics, and eventual playoff states all depended on the experience continuing to function as the campaign evolved.

The launch therefore represented a transition from building the product to operating it. Once the competition began, real fans, real matchups, and real campaign activity replaced test data and pre-launch scenarios.

Launch Was Only the Beginning

Once the Mascot Challenge went live, I remained on call throughout the 16-week campaign, supporting an experience that continued to change alongside the college football season.

The campaign demanded sustained attention. Weekly matchups and challenges introduced new content and new states, fans were actively participating through the site and social channels, and the experience had to remain dependable while the competition moved toward its playoff rounds and eventual championship.

That operational responsibility made the project an important precursor to later high-visibility work I would lead around live events and time-sensitive digital products. It reinforced that successful delivery does not stop when a deployment completes. When a digital experience is connected to a live event, the team has to be prepared to respond while the audience is using it.

A Season of Fan Participation

The finished experience powered a season-long competition among 16 college mascots, combining traditional voting with higher-value social and UGC challenges that rewarded increasingly active forms of fan participation.

The regular season ultimately led into an eight-mascot, three-week, single-elimination playoff. USF’s Rocky the Bull entered the postseason after a 12–0 regular season and completed the competition undefeated, becoming the first mascot in the program’s 12-year history to go undefeated through both the regular season and playoffs.

The winning mascot program received $20,000, while participating schools received $5,000 for their mascot programs. More important to the digital experience, the competition demonstrated how voting, social participation, UGC, data, and weekly programming could work together to sustain engagement over an extended campaign rather than around a single launch moment.

From Development to Continuous Delivery

This project represents another important stage in my progression from hands-on interactive development toward digital delivery and strategy leadership. I was still a Senior Interactive Developer and remained deeply involved in building the product, but my definition of the job was expanding.

I was helping plan how the product would be developed and produced, making architectural decisions, defining API requirements with backend development, translating campaign mechanics into product behavior, establishing interaction direction, participating with stakeholders, working through accessibility remediation, preparing the experience for launch, and remaining accountable while it operated for months.

That combination of responsibilities helped establish a pattern that would continue throughout my career: understand the objective early, bring technical considerations into planning, build with the full lifecycle in mind, resolve issues before they become launch problems, and stay accountable for the experience after it reaches its audience.