Case study · ANT Management, Dubai
One agency. Four systems. Eighteen months of building.
ANT Management is a modelling and talent agency headquartered in Dubai, representing models, kids, actors, influencers, athletes and creatives across the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Proud Lion Studios designed, built and now runs its entire digital operation: the public website, the agency back office, a two-sided booking app, and the search and AI visibility programme that brings clients to the door.
The engagement
What ANT needed, and what we built
When we began, ANT ran a busy agency on spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads and an ageing website. Talent records lived in files, client pitches went out as loose image folders, and bookings were arranged by hand. Over eighteen months that became a connected platform where one talent record feeds the website, the client pitch, the booking app and the search engines at the same time.
antmgmt.com
The public website. Four regional editions, a live roster, direct booking and talent applications.
Read more ↓02ANT Portal
The agency back office. Talent database, media, calendar, client packages, WhatsApp outreach, and the API behind everything.
Read more ↓03ANT Talent app
An iOS booking marketplace. Brands post jobs, vetted talent apply, and payment sits in escrow until the work is done.
Read more ↓04Search and AI visibility
The programme that makes all of it findable on Google, Bing, ChatGPT and Copilot, measured every week.
Read more ↓How the pieces fit
The portal is the single source of truth. When ANT's team adds a model, updates a measurement or marks someone as in town, the website reflects it within minutes, the sitemap and A to Z index pick it up, search engines are notified, and the next client package can include them. Nothing is entered twice.
Timeline
Eighteen months, in order
- March 2025
The booking platform begins
Backend for the ANT Talent app: accounts, profiles reviewed before going live, photo albums and social sign-in.
- August 2025
Website and portal projects open
The Next.js website and the first portal prototype are set up.
- October 2025
ANT Portal, for real
The Laravel back office starts: talent records first, then companies and contacts.
- Jan to Apr 2026
Packages, SEO tools, media at scale
Client packages, the SEO module and blog, WebP images and bulk import. The app adds escrow payments, subscriptions, chat and payouts.
- Jan to Jun 2026
The website built out
Regional editions, filters, profiles, news, direct booking, and lead capture straight into ANT's enquiry sheet.
- July 2026
Portal hardening
Full-resolution image crops, the package overhaul, live notifications and safer WhatsApp sending.
- August 2026
Search foundation goes live
Titles, canonicals, regional hreflang, structured data, recovered legacy URLs, a much lighter homepage, the blog feed and llms.txt.
- August 2026
Server-rendered listings and app safeguards
All talent divisions rendered on the server so search engines see real profile links. Double-booking prevention and targeted job alerts in the app.
- September 2026
AI visibility push
IndexNow for Bing, a Wikidata entity, richer profile schema, Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places.
- September 2026
Attribution and discovery
Every enquiry tagged by source, a sitemap index, an A to Z talent index, and the Talent App page.
System 01 · antmgmt.com
The public face of the agency
A Next.js 15 site with four regional editions, Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar and KSA, each with its own titles, regional targeting and live roster. It is where clients browse, filter and book, where aspiring talent apply, and where the agency's news and articles live.
Live talent across eight divisions
Models, Kids, Talent, Influencers, Sports, Global, Creatives and Stunts, filtered by look, division, availability and city, straight from the portal.
Four editions from one codebase
Region-aware routing gives Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar and KSA their own URLs, titles and hreflang without duplicating effort.
Every enquiry captured and tagged
Contact forms and WhatsApp enquiries land in ANT's enquiry sheet with the page they came from, tagged as advertising or organic.
News and an automated blog
Articles sync on a schedule, are sanitised and quality-gated, and share the design of the agency's own news.
A much lighter homepage
Homepage media cut to a fraction of its original weight, with talent photography left at full quality.
Become a model
Applications flow into the portal's approval queue, so new faces are reviewed where everyone else is managed.
System 02 · ANT Portal
The back office that runs the agency
A Laravel 12 application ANT's staff use every day. It holds the talent database and every image, the companies and contacts, the calendar, and the package system that turns a client brief into a curated pitch in minutes. It also serves the API the public website reads from.
From a client brief to a shortlisted, sent package in seven steps.
Client pitches in minutes
Pick talent from a wishlist, attach portfolios, videos, digitals and comp cards, add recipients and send. Clients shortlist or decline each talent from a private link.
Availability checks at scale
Talent receive yes or no availability messages and replies show live. Sends are paced, batched and capped to stay within WhatsApp's limits.
Full-resolution image tools
Crop, rotate, bulk delete and bulk download. Albums, portfolios and videos, plus comp cards rendered to PDF.
A complete talent file
Legal details, contacts, agencies, usage terms, statistics, skills, documents and notes, with expiry alerts for passports, visas and contracts.
One record, everywhere
A keyed API serves talent, SEO records, blog, FAQs and news to antmgmt.com. Page titles, descriptions and image alt text are managed here.
Calendar and notifications
Events and bookings coloured by booker, a daily digest, and a dashboard of actionable queues.
System 03 · ANT Talent app
Book talent, get booked
A two-sided marketplace on iOS. Brands, studios and producers post a job with one or more roles and rates; ANT-approved talent apply; the client shortlists and books; payment is taken up front and held in escrow until the job is complete, then released to the talent. Every profile and every job is reviewed by ANT before it goes live.
Multi-role jobs with their own rates
Hourly or daily rates per role, suggested ranges, required measurements, and an admin review before any job opens.
Escrow on Stripe
Clients pay on booking; funds are held and released on completion, then paid out to talent through Stripe Connect.
Free, Pro and Elite
Subscriptions through Apple In-App Purchase set application limits, media allowances and a discovery boost, verified server-side.
Reviewed before going live
Every profile and job moves through pending, in review and approved. Applicants export as a PDF per job.
Chat, alerts and a feed
In-app messaging tied to jobs, push notifications, role-targeted job alerts and a Discover feed.
Portfolios and reels
Chunked video upload with thumbnails, image processing and cloud storage, sized to each plan.
System 04 · Search and AI visibility
Being found
A beautiful site nobody can find is a brochure in a drawer. In August 2026 we audited how search engines actually saw antmgmt.com, and a large part of the roster was invisible to them. This is the programme that changed that.
Every page told Google what it is
Unique titles for every listing combination, canonicals, regional hreflang, and structured data for the agency, every profile, article and FAQ.
Legacy links brought back
The old site's URLs and subdomains mapped onto the new structure, so years of links and bookmarks lead somewhere again.
Profiles search engines can reach
Listings rendered on the server, cross-links on every profile, a sitemap index and an A to Z index, guided by Google's own inspection data.
Curating without losing rank
The site remembers recently listed talent, so a model rotating out of town no longer disappears from search.
Findable by ChatGPT and Copilot
IndexNow pushes new pages to Bing within hours; a Wikidata entity, llms.txt, Bing Places and AI crawler access are in place.
One consistent business identity
Google Business Profile category, hours, name, area and phone aligned across the profile, the site and the schema.
Results are pulled from Google's API on a schedule, compared with the baseline and the previous week, and sent to ANT as a branded report with a plain-English summary. A fixed sample of profiles is re-inspected every week, so progress is measured on the same pages every time. The report says what was done, what moved, and what did not.
Under the hood
Engineering worth mentioning
Some of the work is invisible to users and exists because real problems came up in production. A few examples.
Double bookings, prevented
Only paid bookings block a calendar, with a configurable buffer either side, checked at hold and at payment, all in Dubai time including overnight shoots.
WhatsApp sending that stays healthy
Messages are paced, batched with pauses, capped per number per day and checked for a real WhatsApp account first. Stuck runs repair themselves.
Phone numbers that connect
Numbers are stored in full international format, audited by a report, and validated before any message is sent.
Package videos in seconds
Full-quality client package videos now merge on disk instead of streaming, with a failover proxy pool.
A sitemap that survives its data source
A roster cache and a last-good-copy fallback, so an API hiccup never publishes an empty sitemap.
Lead tagging that never overwrites
Each enquiry is appended, then tagged in a separate update to the exact row, so staff notes and hand-tags stay intact.
Job alerts that reach the right people
Each role is matched to talent separately, with age and gender rules mirroring who can apply.
Fast applicant PDFs
Per-job applicant PDFs render reliably, even for jobs with dozens of applicants.
What comes next
The work is not finished
The plumbing is in place. The next phase is substance: biographies on every profile so AI assistants have something to quote, published rates and terms, a trust page that answers the questions people actually ask about an agency, and the Talent App page on the main domain. Each is measured the same way as everything above.
Have an agency, marketplace or platform to build?
Proud Lion Studios designs, builds and runs digital products for bold brands in Dubai and beyond. We measure what we ship, and we tell you when something has not worked yet.
Talent shown are represented by ANT Management and appear as they do on the public website. App screens shown are design boards of the ANT Talent app.
