When global agency, Publicis Sapient were facing a 2-3 month build lead-time using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a CMS for a financial website build, they began exploring Jamstack technology to find an agnostic method for developing websites faster.
We spoke with George Adamson, Senior Manager within Experience Technology and Andrea Mercado, Content Strategist at Publicis Sapient to learn more about how Jamstack and decoupled technology is paving the way towards faster services for their clients.
The appeal of Jamstack technology
Publicis Sapient wanted to be able to quickly deploy demo sites for pitches that would showcase features that could be used in prospective apps and websites with their clients in the financial services sector. Typically AEM would have been the CMS used to power these projects but the prohibitively long development lead-time became the springboard to explore alternative options.
AEM is solid but sometimes rather a big sledgehammer of a CMS. It was going to take too long to build with. We needed a new approach - this Jamstack project using GatherContent has demonstrated huge leaps in productivity which is part of my movement in Publicis Sapient to modernise financial services.
George Adamson, Senior Manager, Experience Technology
Beyond reducing development time, Jamstack architecture is gaining traction for strengths in:
Security - The Jamstack reduces the number of systems required from hosting infrastructure, leaving fewer servers and systems to protect from attack.
Performance - Jamstack sites generate pages ahead of time on a CDN during a build, improving page load speeds and improving user experience and conversion.
Maintainability - In line with reducing hosting complexity, hosting maintenance tasks are greatly reduced.
Portability - As Jamstack sites are pre-generated, they can be hosted from a wide variety of services with more flexibility to move if required.
Infrastructure flexibility - Jamstack sites are not locked-in to proprietary technologies, instead they are compatible with widely available tools and conventions.
Technologies and infrastructure like Jamstack seem to be leading the way in facilitating atomic elements and design. When our devs do that with a business process to understand the logic, I can focus on how to get content to start thinking that way too.
Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead
The XBank tech stack
XBank is a project Publicis Sapient use as a 'user manual' for digital banking transformation, showcasing the expertise of the agency within a live demo site. As mentioned, by choosing Jamstack methodology, the agency was not forced into any systems when selecting technology to support their project, XBank. To demonstrate functionality to prospective clients, Publicis Sapient selected:
Storybook as a pattern library for front-end components
GatherContent was seamlessly integrated into our XBank site through server-side API calls. This meant calls for content didn't effect site speed or performance. It struck a great balance between developer and user experience - our content team could structure and input components as easily as we could integrate them.
Ashleigh Hyslop, Front End Developer
Jamstack compatible content creation
Publicis Sapient needed to gather structured content from contributors and map it to specific sections on the site. This encompassed text content, media and metadata. The content repository needed to be friendly for content creators and flexible enough for developers to access as a content source.
George Adamson, Senior Manager within Experience Technology at Publicis Sapient shared his reasoning for selecting GatherContent as the content source:
We landed on GatherContent because the UI is one of the easiest we've tested. We were able to develop a middleware layer on the GatherContent API to map Content to Components. With our Jamstack hats on we could ensure this layer and its API calls remain in the prerender (serverside) and did not bloat the browser (clientside).
Whilst Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead was able to talk about the choice of GatherContent from the content operations perspective:
GatherContent is an application that lets the business process put content first (where it needs to be) without a lot of setup overhead. Passing content from the business side to the front-end side is always a struggle. Knowing that GatherContent had both native and API integrations meant that I could set up a business-friendly content process, a holistically architected content model, and a dev-friendly hand-off method all in one.
Publicis Sapient was able to create granular content templates in GatherContent to model the content requirements for the website.
Content template in GatherContent for XBank site component
With a real client, content can run through an approval process using content workflow making it easier to manage content creation with clients.
We used guidelines fields in the content components to provide a brief description telling people where this content would fit into the narrative of the page, and why the content was required. It was just so much easier than the nonsense of dealing with Word documents.
Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead
When content is ready for a new site, or when new content is to be added to an existing site, the agency uses GatherContent's API to push content into their build(s).
Compared with the amount of time the business typically expect on these projects, we can iterate incredibly quickly. If we make content changes in GatherContent, the change can be live in 20 minutes, rather than getting a quote from a team to do it over the next week.
George Adamson, Senior Manager, Experience Technology
From a 2-3 month build lead-time, to proof of concept in 6 hours
By adopting a Jamstack approach for the XBank site build, Publicis Sapient was able to deploy a proof of concept homepage in just 6 hours. The first edition of the site took just 2-3 weeks development time.
The demo site they created demonstrates just how fast and flexible Jamstack development is which in turn opens up greater opportunity to service their clients.
View the site: XBank
If you are exploring Jamstack technology and want to understand how GatherContent can fit into your ecosystem, book a demo or start a free trial today to test it yourself.
When global agency, Publicis Sapient were facing a 2-3 month build lead-time using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a CMS for a financial website build, they began exploring Jamstack technology to find an agnostic method for developing websites faster.
We spoke with George Adamson, Senior Manager within Experience Technology and Andrea Mercado, Content Strategist at Publicis Sapient to learn more about how Jamstack and decoupled technology is paving the way towards faster services for their clients.
The appeal of Jamstack technology
Publicis Sapient wanted to be able to quickly deploy demo sites for pitches that would showcase features that could be used in prospective apps and websites with their clients in the financial services sector. Typically AEM would have been the CMS used to power these projects but the prohibitively long development lead-time became the springboard to explore alternative options.
AEM is solid but sometimes rather a big sledgehammer of a CMS. It was going to take too long to build with. We needed a new approach - this Jamstack project using GatherContent has demonstrated huge leaps in productivity which is part of my movement in Publicis Sapient to modernise financial services.
George Adamson, Senior Manager, Experience Technology
Beyond reducing development time, Jamstack architecture is gaining traction for strengths in:
Security - The Jamstack reduces the number of systems required from hosting infrastructure, leaving fewer servers and systems to protect from attack.
Performance - Jamstack sites generate pages ahead of time on a CDN during a build, improving page load speeds and improving user experience and conversion.
Maintainability - In line with reducing hosting complexity, hosting maintenance tasks are greatly reduced.
Portability - As Jamstack sites are pre-generated, they can be hosted from a wide variety of services with more flexibility to move if required.
Infrastructure flexibility - Jamstack sites are not locked-in to proprietary technologies, instead they are compatible with widely available tools and conventions.
Technologies and infrastructure like Jamstack seem to be leading the way in facilitating atomic elements and design. When our devs do that with a business process to understand the logic, I can focus on how to get content to start thinking that way too.
Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead
The XBank tech stack
XBank is a project Publicis Sapient use as a 'user manual' for digital banking transformation, showcasing the expertise of the agency within a live demo site. As mentioned, by choosing Jamstack methodology, the agency was not forced into any systems when selecting technology to support their project, XBank. To demonstrate functionality to prospective clients, Publicis Sapient selected:
Storybook as a pattern library for front-end components
GatherContent was seamlessly integrated into our XBank site through server-side API calls. This meant calls for content didn't effect site speed or performance. It struck a great balance between developer and user experience - our content team could structure and input components as easily as we could integrate them.
Ashleigh Hyslop, Front End Developer
Jamstack compatible content creation
Publicis Sapient needed to gather structured content from contributors and map it to specific sections on the site. This encompassed text content, media and metadata. The content repository needed to be friendly for content creators and flexible enough for developers to access as a content source.
George Adamson, Senior Manager within Experience Technology at Publicis Sapient shared his reasoning for selecting GatherContent as the content source:
We landed on GatherContent because the UI is one of the easiest we've tested. We were able to develop a middleware layer on the GatherContent API to map Content to Components. With our Jamstack hats on we could ensure this layer and its API calls remain in the prerender (serverside) and did not bloat the browser (clientside).
Whilst Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead was able to talk about the choice of GatherContent from the content operations perspective:
GatherContent is an application that lets the business process put content first (where it needs to be) without a lot of setup overhead. Passing content from the business side to the front-end side is always a struggle. Knowing that GatherContent had both native and API integrations meant that I could set up a business-friendly content process, a holistically architected content model, and a dev-friendly hand-off method all in one.
Publicis Sapient was able to create granular content templates in GatherContent to model the content requirements for the website.
Content template in GatherContent for XBank site component
With a real client, content can run through an approval process using content workflow making it easier to manage content creation with clients.
We used guidelines fields in the content components to provide a brief description telling people where this content would fit into the narrative of the page, and why the content was required. It was just so much easier than the nonsense of dealing with Word documents.
Andrea Mercado, Content Strategy Lead
When content is ready for a new site, or when new content is to be added to an existing site, the agency uses GatherContent's API to push content into their build(s).
Compared with the amount of time the business typically expect on these projects, we can iterate incredibly quickly. If we make content changes in GatherContent, the change can be live in 20 minutes, rather than getting a quote from a team to do it over the next week.
George Adamson, Senior Manager, Experience Technology
From a 2-3 month build lead-time, to proof of concept in 6 hours
By adopting a Jamstack approach for the XBank site build, Publicis Sapient was able to deploy a proof of concept homepage in just 6 hours. The first edition of the site took just 2-3 weeks development time.
The demo site they created demonstrates just how fast and flexible Jamstack development is which in turn opens up greater opportunity to service their clients.
View the site: XBank
If you are exploring Jamstack technology and want to understand how GatherContent can fit into your ecosystem, book a demo or start a free trial today to test it yourself.
Becky is a Product Marketing Manager at GatherContent. She has 10+ years working in marketing executing affiliate, content, display, mobile, search and social campaigns for high profile clients across various sectors including Travel, Entertainment and Oil & Energy.
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