IMG UK Ltd., part of the Endeavor group, is a global leader in sports, events, media and talent management. Among its UK event properties was Run to the Beat, London’s landmark music half marathon powered by Nike+, a 13.1-mile course through Greenwich that drew up to 19,000 runners and replaced the usual race-day hush with live DJ sets at every mile.
An event built on that much brand equity needed a digital home to match. IMG asked Net Solutions to design and build the official Run to the Beat website along with the content management platform behind it. The result brought the music line-up, the Greenwich route, Nike+ Training content and the event’s charity partners into a single responsive hub that felt like an extension of the event itself rather than a listings page about it.
Behind that front end sits an eight-module CMS that put race-season content in the hands of IMG’s marketing team. DJ line-ups, sponsor banners, galleries and race-day announcements could all be published in minutes, with no developer in the loop. The site launched in six weeks, ranked first for its target search term, and won Kentico’s Site of the Year in the Travel & Events category.
Organic ranking for “London half-marathon 2012”
Reduction in content update effort
CMS modules under IMG’s direct control
Runners supported at peak event scale
Weeks from kick-off to public launch
Run to the Beat was never only a race. It was a brand experience that fused distance running, live performance and high-profile activation, and the website had to carry all three at once. Representing IMG and Nike+ together meant meeting strict brand standards while absorbing traffic that spiked hard in the weeks before race day.
Three visual identities had to share the same pages without any of them losing authority: Run to the Beat itself, Nike+ Training, and cause partners including Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and Virgin Money Giving. Every template had to hold that balance.
DJ line-ups shift. Sponsors are added. Race-day logistics change the week of the event. IMG’s marketing team needed to publish all of it themselves, immediately, rather than queueing changes behind a development sprint.
Runners, volunteers and Greenwich residents each arrive with different questions and very little patience for wading through content written for someone else. The information architecture had to serve all three without splintering the experience.
Traffic concentrated into a handful of days, much of it on mobile, much of it from people checking route and start-time details while already on the move. Desktop, tablet and phone all had to hold up under that surge.
We treated this as a brand-first build rather than an engineering-first one. The value was in translating two sets of brand guidelines into a polished, responsive experience, not in constructing architecture the event did not need. Every decision was measured against a single question: does this make the site feel like part of the event?
The backend followed the same discipline. Instead of a general-purpose CMS that IMG’s team would have to learn around, we mapped the event’s real touchpoints, music, training, route, fundraising, news, directly onto purpose-built management modules. Editors worked in the vocabulary of the event they were running. That kept editorial autonomy intact through the whole race season and kept the six-week timeline realistic.
A responsive event site and an eight-module Kentico CMS, built around the four things that made Run to the Beat worth showing up for: the brand, the partners, the music and the route. The front end carried the festival atmosphere across every device. The back end handed the race season to IMG’s marketing team.
The home page opens with high-impact event branding and routes visitors straight into the four things they came for: The Route, The Music, Nike+ Training and Sign Up.
Partner activation was designed into the site structure rather than bolted on as sponsor real estate.
The music was the reason the event existed, so the site gave it equal billing with the course.
Eight modules, each mapped to something IMG’s team actually needed to change during a live event season.
Add, edit and remove operations across all eight sat with the marketing team. No tickets, no deployment window, no developer.
Kentico named Run to the Beat its Site of the Year in the Travel & Events category, an award judged on user experience, performance and inventive use of the platform.
The site secured the #1 organic ranking for “London half-marathon 2012”, capturing search demand at exactly the moment prospective runners were deciding which race to enter.
The platform served as the information hub for an event drawing up to 19,000 runners, alongside volunteers, spectators and residents along the Greenwich course.
IMG’s marketing team updated line-ups, news, banners and FAQs independently across the event lifecycle, cutting content update effort by 50% and removing the delay between a decision and its appearance on the site.
Segmented race-day details, route information and operational guidance reached runners, volunteers and residents consistently across mobile, tablet and desktop, including during peak race-week traffic.
We build for the people who run the event, not just the people who visit it: The eight-module CMS exists because we mapped IMG’s actual race-season workflow before writing a line of code. Editorial autonomy was the requirement, not a nice-to-have.
We can hold multiple brands on one page: Run to the Beat, Nike+ and two charity partners each kept their identity intact inside a single design system, which is a harder problem than it looks and one that most event sites solve badly.
We ship on event timelines: Six weeks from kick-off to launch, with a fixed, immovable race date at the end of it. Event work has no flexible deadline and we scope accordingly.
We right-size the build: A lightweight, purpose-built content architecture served this event better than a heavier platform would have. Knowing what not to build is part of the job.
Your event has one date. Your website cannot miss it.
Whether you are launching a mass-participation event, managing a multi-brand activation, or replacing a CMS your marketing team has quietly given up on, we can help you get there on schedule and in brand.
Net Solutions built the official Run to the Beat event website and a custom eight-module Kentico CMS for IMG UK Ltd. The site covered the Greenwich route, the live music line-up, Nike+ Training content, charity partners and audience-segmented FAQs, and it launched within a six-week development cycle.
Run to the Beat was London’s music half marathon, organised by IMG UK Ltd. and powered by Nike+. Runners covered a 13.1-mile course through Greenwich accompanied by live DJ and music performances along the route. At its peak the event attracted up to 19,000 participants.
The site won Kentico’s Site of the Year award in the Travel & Events category and ranked #1 organically for the target keyword “London half-marathon 2012”. It supported an event of up to 19,000 runners and cut IMG’s content update effort by 50% by removing developer dependency.
Kentico suited an event site that needed rapid content changes during a live race season. It supported a lightweight, purpose-built module structure mapped to IMG’s real workflow, allowing marketers to publish line-up changes, banners and race-day announcements immediately, and it fitted the six-week delivery window.
A custom CMS maps content modules to the event’s actual touchpoints rather than to generic page types. For Run to the Beat, that meant dedicated modules for banners, music line-ups, news, galleries, charities, navigation, FAQs and travel information, so the marketing team could publish updates in minutes without a development ticket.
Run to the Beat went from kick-off to public launch in six weeks. Timelines vary with scope, integrations and brand approval cycles, but a focused, brand-led event site with a purpose-built CMS is realistic inside six to eight weeks when the content model is defined early.
By designing a single system that gives each brand its own protected space rather than layering logos over a generic template. On Run to the Beat, the event brand, Nike+ Training and charity partners including Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and Virgin Money Giving each held their identity inside consistent, partner-safe templates.
Yes, provided performance is planned around the spike rather than around average load. The Run to the Beat site was built with responsive front-end architecture tested across desktop, tablet and mobile, since race-week traffic concentrates into a few days and skews heavily towards mobile users checking details on the move.
Yes. Net Solutions has delivered event and sports digital platforms including Run to the Beat for IMG UK Ltd. and licensing and approval platforms for WME Group, IMG’s brand licensing arm. Work spans event websites, content management systems, and enterprise platforms for sports and entertainment organisations.
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