Project Team at @ 46elks
| Carolina J. Säll | Eja Höglund | Sebastian Björkelid |
|---|---|---|
| Product Designer | Full-Stack Developer | Product Manager |
| UI/UX Designer | UI/UX Designer | |
| Project Manager | ||
| Marketing | Adham Mikari | Johannes Ridderstedt |
| Copywriting | Key account manager | Back-End Developer |
SMS Voting in Masked Singer
How do you make it as simple as possible for viewers to vote for their favorite on Masked Singer—without requiring internet access, apps, logins, or downloads? That was the question posed to us by the production company Fremantle Media Sweden when they contacted our support on a typical Monday in February 2024.
Background
Together with colleagues Adham and Johannes, we explored whether we could quickly develop a solution for them. Fremantle had previously used a program for real-time SMS voting from the audience during the Masked Singer TV show, which had ceased functioning. They were left resorting to analog voting with paper and pen among the approximately 300-person audience, a process that was incredibly time-consuming to execute manually.
This time is extremely costly for a production to allocate to something that should be swift and is a crucial component of the show. They were now urgently seeking a solution similar to what they had before for the remaining three episodes of Masked Singer—and that’s where we stepped in to swiftly undertake such a project to assist them. Since we didn’t have a ready-made solution, we had to act quickly and, together with them, develop a set of requirements to initiate the development project.
Client Requirements
In collaboration with the audience coordinator and project manager for Masked Singer, we held a meeting the following day to clarify how the voting process works in the show, what limitations exist, and what type of overview they need of the votes to promptly inform the rest of the production staff and the host.
The solution needed to:
- Operate in real-time—votes should be displayed live
- Be fully accessible—anyone should be able to participate via SMS, without technical prerequisites
- Handle high load—hundreds of votes within a short time frame
- Manage multiple responses—there are several options to vote for
Our Solution
Our goal was to create an accessible, scalable, and reliable way to collect hundreds of votes—in just a few minutes, under the time pressure of filming.
Since Masked Singer is a show divided into different rounds, there isn’t just one voting session per episode, but two. The first part can be prepared, but the second part is more time-sensitive. Here’s how it works:
The audience coordinator in the production can prepare a question during the first part of the episode. All they have to do is to go in to the SMS voting platform and create their SMS question before it needs to go out to the panel. This is what it will look like when you enter the SMS platform, you’ll get asked to create a SMS campaign straight away.
The campaign will be made up of two components, a question and a recipients list. So to be able to send out a SMS campaign, the coordinator must have first prepared a question and saved it. Below you can see what that would look like in the platform:
Next step is to check or update the recipients lists. For Masked Singer they will use two different lists, once for the audience and one for the panel jury. The audience list is a new list comprised of about 300 people participating for each recording of the tv show. The audience coordinator will get this list of phone numbers a couple of days before the recording day and will import that in to the platform.
The recipients list of the panel jury will always be the same during the entire season of the show. Below you can see how that looks in the SMS platform:
Once those two components are created the audience coordinator can create the SMS campaign and send out the question to the audience or the panel jury. The question might look something like this then:
Who would you like to vote forward in the competition?
Reply 1 for Racing Fox
Reply 2 for Sushi
Reply 3 for Porcelain Doll
Each Masked singer participant received a unique vote ID (e.g., MASK1, MASK2). To vote, viewers send the number corresponding to their choice to a virtual phone number that’s connected to the voting SMS platform.
The votes are automatically logged in a backend system, which in turn presents vote counts in real-time in a results view for the audience coordinator on the screen. This allows them to inform the rest of the production about the results so that the episode can proceed. And that looks like this:
That’s how the actual voting goes on behind the scenes of one of Sweden’s most popular tv shows! Pretty cool huh?
I am proud to have worked on this project together with both my coworkers and the talented people at Fremantle Media Sweden.
My Role
- Acted as the client liaison and project manager for the project; together with the client, we developed a set of requirements for how the solution should function
- Coordinated internal resources in the form of developers to design the system
- Followed up with the client the following year to further develop the system for the next season
- Conducted research on previous systems they had used to create familiarity for the client
- Helped define the flow for how votes would be received and processed
- Collaborated with developers and the client to iterate the solution
- Contributed to how result data would be presented—both live and for analysis
- Participated on-site as a technical resource during the first recording with the new voting system when it was live to reassure the client
The Result
The voting functioned smoothly throughout the remainder of the 2024 season and was used in several episodes. Fremantle was so satisfied with our assistance that they reached out for a follow-up the following year, where we received another assignment from them to further develop the service together. That’s when Eja Höglund joined as a developer and was able to give the solution a facelift in the form of a more thoughtful UI and UX.