Last week, we held our first ever MadTech Summit at the beautiful Collective spaces in the heart of London. It was a chance for the Collider brand and agency partners to come together, be inspired and share best practices and challenges. The theme, More than MadTech, brought to light the opportunities for MadTech in the connected verticals, AI and VR. Short, inspirational talks on the future of responsive organisations by the legendary Gabbi Cahane, and from the founders of Juke Deck and Visualise – two cutting –edge companies working in AI and VR respectively.
Following this, a longer workshop designed to help the brand and agency mentors think through how they’re engaging with innovation in their organisations at the moment. Each person worked in a group of two or three with someone from another of Collider’s brand or agency partners. Here are some of the themes from the morning session:
Talent development
Big Brands and agencies spend a lot of time and resources on talent development and retention annually. One way brands and agencies are doing this is by introducing their teams to new ways of working and thinking – Collider runs a ‘How to Work with Startups’ workshop as part of the programme. This gives people interested in becoming involved in innovation the practical skills and mindset to go into any meeting with a startup.
Empowering your staff
Through talent development, people working at brands and agencies also become empowered within their organisations. They have been exposed to something out of their comfort zone and come away with knowledge others in their organisations don’t have. This also gives individuals a sense of agency within an organisation and they feel empowered to make decisions. Where large corporates once faced bottlenecks in the innovation process, this begins to disappear as more people have the skills to make decisions.
Camelot have begun startup secondments to empower their employees. Staff members are encouraged to spend a day working with a Collider startup to learn about what life is like on the other side. Check out how our first ever secondment went.
Trials & Revenues
A common challenge our brand and agency partners face is procurement. This process can take over 6 months from beginning to end – a time lapse which can kill a startup. With Unilever, we helped them come up with a procurement process cut down from 90 days to 30 days for startups.
There is More to MadTech
Our good friend Rod Banner recently wrote an article defining what MadTech is and why you need to take note of it. It comes down to anything helping brands and agencies better find, understand, engage with and sell to their consumers. By automating it, personalising the experience, enticing all of their senses in new and exciting ways, or providing the marketeers with previously unmeasurable data. And this definition is not tired solely to what we usually think is MarTech or AdTech - programmatic advertising, social media analytics, or influencer engagement. But it includes the likes of; Power of the crowd, Future of Content, AI, Mobile Tech, Smart Devices & Wearables, In-store Engagement, Big Data, Customer Loyalty, and Multi-Channel Innovation. There's more to MadTech thank we think.