GreenerLight
New website · Creative direction · Custom build
Client:
NBCUniversal
The CMS-powered hub for championing Universal’s GreenerLight Program and its sustainability efforts across their blockbuster films.
Over my decade at Powster, our team built a strong relationship with Universal, creating official movie sites and ticketing destinations for nearly all of their global releases. This time, we turned the spotlight on what was happening behind the scenes.
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A unique opportunity to do some good
NBCUniversal knows the entertainment industry has a large environmental footprint. They also know it has a unique ability to inspire widespread positive change, and with the 2023 launch of their GreenerLight Program, that's exactly what they set out to do across Universal Pictures, Focus Features, and DreamWorks Animation.
They needed a destination that could educate audiences, celebrate their sustainability work across productions, and give people a natural connection between the films they love and the eco-friendly initiatives behind them. As someone who’s always striving to live sustainably, I didn't need convincing.
The brief: make GreenerLight a hub worth visiting: engaging, flexible enough for their team to keep fresh, and able to hold everything from industry-wide engagement to project-level highlights and ongoing news.
Not your average press release
With an established logo and colour palette in place, our team focused on condensing content into a natural browsing experience and leaned into contrasting shades with bold, friendly typography to add tension and curiosity to what might otherwise read as corporate material.
I led the build: assembling, styling, and populating componentised layouts from Powster's proprietary platform, then stress-testing the CMS for flexibility and real-world content management. With a heavy reliance on talent imagery and video to create audience familiarity, asset optimisation and compression were a constant focus throughout.
More time and new defaults
A tight timeline and limited development resource meant we were up against it on bug fixing and CMS optimisation: lessons that fed into longer term ambitions for improving Powster's platform products.
With more time, I'd have prioritised the sustainability of the website itself more explicitly: content infrastructure, accessibility, and media optimisation. Things like maximum permitted file sizes in the CMS and alt text as required fields, built in from the start rather than left to editorial discretion. More client education on the impact of their new platform, and how to make it as much of a force for good as the work it's promoting.
My thinking on all of this has come a long way since; I now know how to suggest things like choice nudging and positive defaults from the outset, and how to frame them as a benefit, not a bonus.
Thanks to the GreenerLight website, NBCUniversal’s prolific studios can effectively present and constantly update their sustainability work for a vast moviegoer audience, and inspire them to take their own steps toward greener entertainment.
