Guardian Labs is the branded content arm of the Guardian. They create engaging stories that connect brands to audiences. Producing highly customized interactive stories were expensive, not scalable and inefficient. They needed tools to build digital stories for the brands and become a become a technology expertise.

How can the Guardian Labs deliver exceptional branded content fast, while staying true to their tailor-made approach?

The Guardian Labs partnered with Code and Theory to collaborate with a multi-disciplined content team and build their first storytelling platform.

The new platform system allowed the Guardian Labs to build a series of co-created case studies with Cisco in a very short timeline.

Stories go beyond connecting articles. We wanted to create narrative arcs to engage readers providing them the ability to follow stories.

We defined two ways to path users: at the beginning with a call to action for next story. And at the end of the story with a package that provides an overview of the upcoming stories.

To increase engagement on articles, the structure should allow for rhythm and variation in the density. As the user scrolls down, the narrative arc will evolve.

I led the strategy, ux and creative for this project.

With our framework and CMS, Code and Theory has empowered The Guardian Labs to create complex interactive series for future branded partnerships with ease, elegance, and clarity.

The first five interactive articles created with our new platform and CMS circulated widely, with more than 105,000 shares.
Cisco, the first advertiser to use our new framework, was the top performing native advertiser in The Guardian’s history.