Nickelodeon - Kids' Choice Awards 2023

The 36th Annual Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards celebrated the year’s biggest stars on March 4, 2023, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, with Nate Burleson and Charli D'Amelio hosting. Ahead of the event, a nominations special aired on March 2, and the show was simulcast across multiple networks, reaching audiences worldwide.

Monks partnered with Nickelodeon to create an interactive microsite for the event, featuring a coming soon teaser, pre-show nomination voting, and live voting and updates during the broadcast. Built using NextJS with server-side rendering (SSR) and hosted on AWS (leveraging Docker, ECS, S3, and CloudFront), the microsite was designed to handle high traffic while maintaining exceptional performance.

In my role as Technical Director, I oversaw and led the technical aspects of the project from end-to-end, including:

• Contributing to the sales pitch and securing the project.
• Conducting technical discovery and requirements gathering.
• Planning and designing the scalable architecture.
• Working closely with Monks’ internal hosting team to set up and configure the infrastructure and CI/CD process.
• Reviewing code and collaborating closely with client marketing and technical teams, as well as internal creative, project management, and account teams, to ensure successful delivery.

Key technical highlights included:

• Scalable backend architecture using Docker and AWS ECS with automatic scaling behind a load balancer to ensure high availability.
• AWS CloudFront caching, achieving a 99% cache ratio, significantly reducing server reliance and delivering a fast, seamless user experience.
• DatoCMS integration for dynamic, real-time content management without requiring new builds, especially critical during the live event.

This robust infrastructure enabled the microsite to handle millions of users with zero downtime, while providing a cost-effective solution. Interactive voting features, managed by a separate vendor, were seamlessly embedded into the microsite to enhance user engagement.