​We partnered with CNN on their flagship Magic Wall, beginning with the 2018 midterm elections, evolving and adapting over the years and leading into the 2020 presidential election. The Magic Wall—with John King at the controls—has been a critical part of CNN’s politics, live election coverage, and storytelling for almost 10 years. Working quickly to hit on-air coverage dates, we rebuilt everything from the ground up. We created a new technical architecture, making the Magic Wall more flexible and scalable, and built a completely custom set of maps on top of heavily customized mapping technology. To handle the tremendous amounts of live data, we developed an ultra-fast, ultra-secure data architecture that performed flawlessly on election night. We also reimagined the look and feel by modernizing it and focusing on readability and hierarchy. In today’s world, viewers increasingly gloss over complex information in favor of simpler and more dynamic news formats. Our Magic Wall work gave CNN a critical tool to reach this evolving audience by presenting crucial information in a design-driven, clear, yet engaging way. This storytelling approach was highly successful in educating a large swath of the American public on key political events and issues during the election cycle. Following the midterms, CNN was the No. 1 news network both on broadcast and cable among adults 25-54, posted its best audience for a midterm broadcast ever, and had its largest prime time audience since 2016 election night. In 2019 we built a CMS to power the Magic Wall that broadcast producers and John King could use to create their own datasets and make on the fly updates for in-the-moment on-air coverage. The Magic Wall has supported live election coverage for every Primary throughout the Spring and Summer including on-site support for Iowa and Super Tuesday resulting in over 100 hours of election coverage for primaries. The wall has worked as hard as John King himself – and is becoming a smarter co-host year after year. Our work has well-positioned CNN to continue this important dialog heading into the presidential election year–a project on which we are actively working.