Where Innovative Ideas Become a Reality in 24 Hours
As consumers interact with brands and content in new ways, the line between advertising, marketing, and public relations continues to blur and shift in new and exciting ways. Porter Novelli, Omnicom’s Public Relations Agency, understands that this rapidly changing landscape requires holistic, coordinated, and cross-channel approaches to not only how we talk to audiences but also how we understand their behaviors across various channels.
That’s why we’ve always jumped at the chance to participate in the Annalect Hackathons. Traditionally, Hackathons are events where programmers get together to collaboratively code or build something. The Annalect Hackathons apply that concept to the marketing & communications field – it’s an opportunity for us to put our heads together with some of the amazing talent from across Omnicom’s network, including advertising, PR, and other marketing and communications agencies to bring innovative, cross-channel ideas into reality in 24 hours.
I represented Porter Novelli at the most recent Omnicom Hackathon, hosted by Spotify and organized by Annalect. We’ve joined every Hackathon to date; as the Platforms Manager on PN’s advanced analytics team, it was my second opportunity to participate. The teams included developers, designers, PR professionals, advertising experts, and marketing gurus. We brainstormed, argued, high-fived, launched new servers, joined datasets, had some beers, joined some more datasets, slept a little, then came back to Spotify to do it all again on day two.
At this year’s event, my team developed a tool that allows content producers to research the preferences and habits of their target audience. The key differentiator was that because we had access to a robust variety of data sources from across Omnicom’s network, including Annalect’s proprietary DMP data, we could blend advertising data, consumer behavior data, and Spotify listener data, painting a full picture of our audience’s behavior and preferences throughout the day and across channels. Unfortunately, we didn’t win and get to take home those brand new Bose speakers, but it’s hard to compete with a tool that finds a song to match your mood using facial recognition technology (and that was built in 24 hours)!
Hackathons force collaboration among agencies in a high-pressure situation. It’s also an opportunity to work directly with amazing Omnicom partners like Twitter, Google and Spotify; I worked with their rich and compelling datasets and enjoyed Spotify’s swanky offices (& their great snacks!). I left the event inspired, with new ideas to take back to Porter Novelli and new relationships across the OMC network. I’m glad that Porter Novelli and Omnicom value this kind of collaboration and innovation and look forward to the next one.