Following on from our all-hands last week, we wanted to follow up with information about Spark24 and how to get involved.
WHAT IS SPARK24?
It is our commercial hackathon where all our markets and some of our clients come together in Bengaluru to team up with our CoE talent to create innovative product solutions for clients. The 24 hour hackathon will be held on 21st September.
Spark24’s tagline is 'hacking the future of programmatic' and we're excited to see ideas that span both some of our major focuses today within identity and cookieless, TV, creative, environmental sustainability, attention etc - but also looks forward at emerging and future-facing themes around gaming, AR, e-comm and more.
Drive connection - this event is about building stronger engagement and connection between CoE and our commercial markets.
Incremental revenue - we want to create relevant product solutions that can be taken back into market to deliver incremental revenue. Our goal is to sell $20m of revenue in 2023 from Spark24 solutions.
WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME?
Engagement scores went through the roof and 98% of those who took part said they'd want to do it all over again.
In addition, we delivered over $20m of incremental revenue from solutions that were hacked from our 2019 event - many of which went on to become key tenets of our product roadmap.
Some of the highlights from the teams last year-round…
TV intelligence - a super innovative tool that brought political TV planning intelligence to life and underpinned many multi-million independent agency commitments. This became a central pillar of the TV roadmap and is now broader than the original political focus
YouTube - a lot of the work we do connecting to the YouTube API came from the original Truview insights team in 2019
Cohorts geo planner from the UK team which evolved into a central product focus, enabling us to score cookieless signals to create custom cohort models for our brands
DOOH planning tool in CA that underpinned several million dollars of incremental revenue in the Dentsu partnership
If you want to see more on the teams last time around then check out our internal Spark24 microsite here.
TIMELINE & HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Early August we will announce the ideas from our commercial markets that have been selected to compete in Spark24. But none of these can happen without you! You can pick the idea you’d like to work on - the Spark24 team will make sure each team has a balance of skills
Before the end of August - Team allocation will be announced
September 19th - Commercial markets will arrive in Bengaluru
September 21st - The hack begins!
September 22nd - The winner is announced and the after party begins
Some of you have reached out to ask if you can share ideas - of course, but these need to be in collaboration with our commercial markets - so if you have an idea that you would like to share, below are the Solutions Leads in each market that you can contact. The deadline for submission is July 22nd:
US: Mid-Atlantic and South - Anne-Sophie Bang & Wade Mayes North East - Lucy Pan, Emily Kowalczyk, Archit Singh Midwest - Great Lakes - Clayton Myers & Mussttafa Shelo Midwest SW - Frankie Scarafile, Abhinav Bhardwaj, Sophie Armitage West - Sophie Armitage, Aman Kumar Sharma In-housing - Clayton Myers, Shamshu Dharwez Saganvali, Archit Singh
