A fast, low-ops foundation for global brand work
For Wunderman Thompson, the engineering challenge of launching a global brand website is rarely about the creative work—it's about the infrastructure behind it. The agency’s Engineering and Design Manager, Rodrigo Barona, says the platform has removed the anxiety traditionally tied to going live: “Normally, it’s not easy to sleep when you launch a website. But now, it’s not my business. It’s Vercel’s.” By outsourcing the edge network and server management, the team can focus on delivering client work quickly.
Reusing a UI kit across a monorepo
Wunderman Thompson manages clients across different content, commerce, and data stacks. Building sites from scratch for each one would be slow and costly. Instead, Barona’s team combines Vercel and Turborepo to assemble a live site within hours of a request. The workflow follows a few steps:
The team builds a site from components in a monorepo UI kit that consolidates the agency’s brand ideas. Turborepo lets all developers share this kit instantly, and remote caching keeps build cycles fast even as the repo grows.
Using Vercel’s integrations ecosystem, the agency plugs in client data headlessly. Often this only means basic brand essentials from a CMS—colors, logos, fonts—but the architecture can scale to accommodate full content later.
Vercel’s Git push workflow turns a commit into a live deployment in seconds. Clients are brought in early to review tangible ideas, and sites typically go through three or four iterations with responsive turnaround.
Vercel Analytics gives the team visibility into audience data and core vitals. They can also connect familiar testing tools into the same dashboard alongside their deployments.
“Only for not maintaining any of our own servers, Vercel pays off. Then when we go inside the platform and know more about the previews, Git commits, and deploys and so on . . . it’s almost like magic.”
Rodrigo Barona Wunderman Thompson
Feedback without screenshot chains
Iterating with clients once required screenshots passed through email and chat apps. Vercel Comments now lets reviewers place feedback directly on a preview version of the site. Since comments live in the Vercel dashboard, they sit adjacent to deployment tools. A granular notification center lets users decide how to stay informed on updates.
Barona adopted the commenting feature within hours of release and now uses it with most clients. What once took week-long conversations now resolves with same-day deploys.
“Comments have greatly improved our feedback process both internally among our marketers and designers and externally with our global clients—everything happens in the Preview and nothing gets lost in screenshots being sent back and forth.”
Rodrigo Barona Wunderman Thompson
Running many sites without running servers
Handling the global reach of 15 to 20 concurrent brand projects would normally require extensive server infrastructure. Wunderman Thompson moved from WordPress and PHP deployments, where they managed servers directly and watched long build times closely. With Vercel, code goes from GitHub straight to deployment. Vercel Checks catches site-breaking issues before anything goes live, so the agency doesn’t have to monitor deployments manually.
“We can manage and run projects in the Vercel user interface like it’s a normal email or any other platform. This is the feel: new project, connect, choose a project, deploy, domain, check. I don’t need to have any skills, or any CLI concepts, or anything.”
Rodrigo Barona Wunderman Thompson
The result: when a client asks how long until the new version of their site is ready, Barona says he can reply, “It’s already up.”
