Agency partner JvM NECKAR builds THE LÄND for Baden-Württemberg

Note: This case study was initially published under the Platform.sh brand. It has been republished (updated) to reflect our new name, Upsun. All results and insights remain unchanged

How one state spurred prospective resident relocation through virtual exploration

Home to lush, green valleys, majestic mountains, and winding rivers. Family-owned businesses and brand behemoths like Bosch and Porsche. Tinkerers and inventors. Wine tasters and fortune-cookie makers. No, it’s not some Hollywood script mashup. But it does seem to be a land that dreams are made of. 

Why, then, did Baden-Württemberg—the prosperous, culturally diverse, third-largest state in Germany—feel it crucial to develop a global campaign to motivate people to move to its idyllic region? First and foremost, to secure skilled workers, professionals, and specialists (domestically and abroad) who could fill an abundance of open positions in the near term. And second, to prepare the state and its citizens for the seismic shifts digital transformation will demand moving forward. 

The Baden-Württemberg Ministry's Department of State Marketing and Events put out a request for proposal to German-based marketing agencies to help address the challenge of attracting vibrant, qualified residents to the region. With deep experience developing fresh, innovative user experiences, Upsun agency partner Jung von Matt (JvM) NECKAR won the bid to create a campaign that would meet the Ministry’s key objectives. 

Welcome to THE LÄND project.

A balance of agency creativity and government requirements

A subset of the global, award-winning Jung von Matt Group—a marketing leader for more than 20 years—the JvM NECKAR team took on the creative challenge of bringing the Baden-Württemberg project to life.

The concept? An interactive, 3D-animated website, where prospective residents can explore the region by selecting personal and professional categories most interesting and relevant to them—spanning topics from career opportunities, education, and healthcare to local attractions and hiking trails.

Before tackling THE LÄND website, the JvM NECKAR development team was tasked with meeting the Ministry's foundational requirements: 

• Host the site in a German-based data center
• Engage a European hosting provider
• Protect the site from cyberattacks
• Ensure user data remains private

To do it, JvM NECKAR turned to Upsun.

Freedom and flexibility: automated DevOps, preferred tech stack 

Historically, the JvM NECKAR development team managed monolithic servers, taking time away from more creative, frontend work. “We didn’t want to configure and maintain our own servers; we wanted to focus on the user experience and frontend,” explains JvM NECKAR Technical Director Philippe Just. “So we looked for a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) configuration. While we considered Netlify, it just didn't meet all the Ministry's requirements.”

“With Upsun, we're happy to have found a solution with regional data centers and roots in Europe, security and privacy guardrails, and a product that can take care of our DevOps automatically. All we have to do is just click something together, and everything runs and works.”

– Philippe Just
Technical Director
JvM NECKAR

With DevOps no longer weighing them down, the JvM NECKAR dev team had more time to focus on their bold, imaginative project.   

To begin to develop THE LÄND, the team took advantage of the speed Upsun provides to easily spin up environments. And the freedom to bring their preferred, full tech stack into the headless project mix—a combination of ThreeJS, VueJS, Nuxt, and Storyblok (CMS). The content in Storyblok renders with NUXT to a static HTML frontend hosted on Upsun. Technical Director Just also had the flexibility to reassign developer resources or add them back to the project on the fly—another Upsun benefit.

“It was very easy and handy to build up these services, especially for THE LÄND,” Just explains. “We have the tech stack we like to use, so our developers could jump into the project quickly. We also used some PHP microservices to implement an integration from Stepstone by filtering relevant job offers from the state of Baden-Württemberg. So it was very easy to set up a new service in Upsun beside the Node server.”

Built-in security and compliance support mandated guardrails

Initially announced through a press release from the state’s Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann, Phase I of THE LÄND project, which launched in October 2021, focused on informing and engaging German residents through a campaign landing page. Politics and potential opposition to the campaign surfaced security concerns. 

Robust, high levels of built-in security and compliance (including SOC-2, PCI-DSS, European GDPR , and the German BDSG)—fully automated and managed by Upsun—offered JvM NECKAR and Baden-Württemberg the safeguards needed to protect the site and user data from external interference and exposure. “We knew the Minister-President’s press conference would draw many visitors to the website,” explains Just. “So we used Cloudflare on top of Upsun. That brought us a very good, stable setup.”

Prospective residents flock to THE LÄND

THE LÄND Phase II, launched in November 2022, targets potential Baden-Württemberg residents from around the world with its full-featured, interactive, 3D experience.

Since then, the site has been showered with accolades and stratospheric metrics: a whopping 1,800% increase in site traffic, easily handled by the scalable Upsun infrastructure, based in a German data center.

“Upsun is a very cost-effective way for us to host client projects and makes development time even faster,” 

– Philippe Just