Financial Times powers marketing innovation through partnership with startup accelerator Collider

28 June 2016 | London

Today the Financial Times begins a year-long partnership with London-based Collider, a tech business accelerator focusing on innovation in marketing and advertising.

Over the course of the year, the FT will work with Collider on a structured programme for its product, technology and commercial teams, aimed at stimulating new ideas and answering questions around how to best serve clients and readers in the future. The programme will include:

● Innovation workshops providing practical skills for staff to work effectively with startups ● ‘Deep Dives’ focused on generating creative solutions to problems using new technologies ● Opportunities to connect directly with startups focused on business and talent development

Jon Slade, chief commercial officer at the Financial Times, said; “We're thrilled to be announcing our partnership with Collider. The disruption of the publishing world, and in particular within advertising and marketing, creates wonderful opportunities for experimentation, and the startup environment can inspire much of the future fuel for our growth engines. Collider are experts at filtering and nurturing innovation in this space, and we're really excited about working with the team. All businesses need to ensure that they have a consistent injection of energy, and the FT's partnership with Collider further underlines the FT's credentials and intentions around digital innovation.”

Andy Tait, co-founder of Collider says: “Collaborating with publishers is always a pleasure at Collider, and working with the FT is something very special for us. Disruption to traditional publisher models present great opportunities and we’re delighted that the FT has a strong desire to understand the value of working with innovative startups from across the globe”.

Collider currently works with leading industry publishers, including Haymarket in London. The team have a long history of working with publishers, from co-founder Rose Lewis’ experiences as head of sales in the UK at Ziff-Davis, to partner Frank Kelcz, who has launched 27 magazines in eight languages, on three continents.

Collider has invested in 34 startups in the marketing and advertising technology (MadTech) space over the past four years. The FT joins Collider’s current corporate partners including Asda, DigitasLBi, dunnhumby, Exterion Media, Haymarket, Ogilvy & Mather Group UK, Puma, Reevoo, The National Lottery and Unilever.

The partnership follows the FT’s recent investment in Alpha Grid, a company specialising in the development and production of quality branded content.

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For more information, please contact:

Financial Times

Megan Dold megan.dold[at]ft.com T: +44 (0) 20 7775 6587 M: +44 (0) 7429 394 221

Collider

Alexandra Connerty alexandra[at]collider.io T: +44 (0) 20 7099 2160 M: +44 (0) 7541 214246

About the Financial Times:

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing essential news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community, the FT has a combined paid print and digital circulation of 793,000. Mobile is an increasingly important channel for the FT, driving half of total traffic.

About Collider:

Collider is an accelerator dedicated to marketing and advertising startups, who help brands and agencies identify, understand, engage with and sell to their consumers. Collider invests capital in these startups, coaches them through a highly structured programme and connects them to potential corporate customers and investors. Collider also partner with brilliant brands and agencies to help them work closely with game-changing tech and introduce their teams to new ways of working.

Behind the Scenes: Cablato

Hear the startups participating in Collider’s first Startup Booster Programme. We’re taking you behind the scenes.

Who are you and what do you do?

Cablato is redefining digital media by bringing hyper-personalised creative to programmatic advertising. Our programmatic-creative ad-serving platform is the first of its kind to combine leading-edge data management and cross device, dynamic ad serving. The result is an exceptional personalised customer experience throughout the customer journey, with every individual receiving a uniquely personalised ad in less than 5 milliseconds. Convenience and simplicity forms the basis of our proprietary technology. Built in the cloud, our platform simplifies creating and managing personalised advertising campaigns across any device, at scale, accelerating results up to 10 times. Our data platform is the easiest and most compliant way for advertisers to on-board customer, enterprise, first and third party data for digital advertising. Our integrated recommendation engine analyses multiple data sources, deciding on the perfect combination of creative, price, offer and CTA for each consumer in under a second. Integrated with major mobile and web ad trading platforms (DSPs), Cablato enables advertisers to gain all the benefits of personalised advertising while still retaining full control of campaigns and media spend using their existing technologies. Not surprisingly, Cablato is quickly gaining traction with campaigns going live for major advertisers in the USA, Europe, Asia and Australasia and partnership agreements being set up with Oracle and Acxiom.

Who are your co-founders & give us one line about each of you.

Adrian Pearmund is a digital business specialist with in depth knowledge in Programmatic Advertising, Data, Technology, Digital Media and Mobile Alex Vernikov is Cablato’s CTO, technology architect and chief engineer.

Where in the world are you from and what drew you to London?

Adrian is from London and Alex is from Amsterdam. Outside of the US, London is the hub for media, data and programmatic and offers the biggest market opportunity.

What excites you most about London (one startup point and one non-startup point!)?

London is a vibrant, exciting city. Being in London, we’re fortunate to be at the centre of media and tech innovation, have access to great talent and global clients.

Explain why your company is a MadTech company, and how you plan to disrupt the larger ecosystem.

Cablato is at the forefront of media technology and innovation. We are the industry's first true programmatic-creative ad-serving platform that combines leading edge data management and cross device ad-serving to deliver exceptional personalised customer experiences throughout the buyer journey. The platform enables brands and agencies to seamlessly on-board and use data for creative personalisation and optimisation, generate dynamic ads based on both owned and purchased data, including customer CRM, enterprise data such as pricing and availability, third party data, contextual data and behavioural data – in real-time. By connecting and actioning multiple data sources in realtime, accuracy and relevancy of creative is improved whilst ad-serving latency is keep to a minimal. This is not going to be possible in set-ups which connect independent data sources and ad-servers, where latency could be issue, learning feedback loops don’t exist and sets-ups are manual, complex and require manual optimisation. Cablato will also pass back segment IDs to the DSP assisting with optimisation and performance, another unique feature. Typical ad serving and dynamic content features are covered by standard in the platform, but it’s our ability to use broad historical and real-time data for personalisation, combined with the capabilities of our platform that we believe makes Cablato unbeaten.

What is one challenge you have had to overcome since beginning your journey?

As with all new technology, it can be complex to explain simply, especially to individuals outside of the media and programmatic media industries. As the concept of programmatic creative has gained more traction, this challenge has become easier

Tell us about where you think Collider can add the most value to you over the next four months

Collider has an unparalleled reputation for supporting and accelerating the growth and advertising technologies companies. Being part of the Collider family, we look forward to gaining business support, access to prospective clients and investors.

What advice would you give to founders who are applying to Collider

Clarify your business proposition, it’s value, the need in the market and opportunity. Work on your financial model, understand SaaS business models, MRR etc. Get some traction Persevere!

Behind the scenes: ConnectID

Hear the startups participating in Collider’s first Startup Booster Programme. We’re taking you behind the scenes.

Who are you and what do you do?

ConnectID are a London based start up tackling the age-old problem of maintaining up to date contact details for the people you know. You’re really busy right? Yet you’re still responsible for maintaining everyone else's details. Contacts are scattered everywhere and people change jobs, numbers and addresses all the time. Everyone’s address book, therefore, quickly gets out of date.

The 15th Century business card to exchange contact details still has its place but ultimately it doesn’t stay up to date. Everyone stores contact details in their smartphone, yet still in todays digital age it quickly gets outdated, we think that’s not very smart.

We have developed an app with patented technology for both people and businesses to access, share and automatically update contact details for people who store their address book in their smartphone. The app is supported by a dashboard for organisations, which enables them to send messages direct to their members mobile devices.

Who are your co-founders & give us one line about each of you.

Tassos Papantoniou is a successful Yacht Broker by trade and believes the business card has its place but contacts need to be redesigned for our fast paced and dynamic lives.

Allison Wightman is a modern marketer of all things digital who has worked in the corporate world all her life before successfully jumping ship to a start up.

Where in the world are you from and what drew you to London?

Tassos the company founder studied in America, UK and Greece, however, London has been his home since he studied at Cass Business School.

Allison was born in Birmingham and then moved to Yorkshire, Cheshire, Nottingham, Manchester, London and then Brighton.

What excites you most about London (one startup point and one non-startup point!)?

London is working hard to earn the number 2 spot on the map for tech businesses behind Silicon Valley, not least through the work of Tech London Advocates.

London is a forward thinking, multi cultural place, just like our company. However, as I write this on the dawn of the BREXIT result it seems like an island compared to the rest of the UK and tech skills and services may be all we have left to export!

Explain why your company is a MadTech company, and how you plan to disrupt the larger ecosystem.

Every marketer relies on an up to date database to be able to market to – we believe our product at critical mass has the potential to extend to brands with users express permission to share their contact details with the brands they love. ConnectiD has a vision to organise the worlds contact information by giving people control of their own information and then syndicating it to people and brands they are happy to have access to it.

What is one challenge you have had to overcome since beginning your journey?

We have done 3 versions of this product web based, hybrid and now native – its taken a long time and a lot of money but we have learned a lot along the way, however, we should have failed faster!

Tell us about where you think Collider can add the most value to you over the next four months.

Help us get the positioning of our product and brand right and to help us develop our business model further alongside brands to understand what pain points they have and how ConnectiD could potentially address them.

What advice would you give to founders who are applying to accelerator programmes?

Find an accelerator that has aligned values to your company – shop around as all accelerator programmes are not made equal

Behind the Scenes: Duel

Hear the startups participating in Collider’s first Startup Booster Programme. We’re taking you behind the scenes.

Who are you and what do you do?

I am Paul Archer and I am the founder of Duel. Duel is a fully automated, AI powered tool that lets brands manage user-generated content with absolute control. They can run photo, video, GIF and idea competitions, polls and automatically post highly engaging interactive display adverts featuring the best of this content.

Where in the world are you from and what drew you to London?

I started the company in Bristol and moved to London now it has begun to scale and I need to be closed to our clients. It’s also one of, if not the most exciting cities in the world.

What excites you most about London (one startup point and one non-startup point!)?

London has everything you need. Every company has a major office here, and it’s perfectly positioned to travel to markets all around the world. It also never stops. There’s always something amazing and interesting going on every hour of every day (and night).

Explain why your company is a MadTech company, and how you plan to disrupt the larger ecosystem.

We help brands let their customers tell their stories. Our product allows brand managers unlock the power of their audience and brings them into the conversation on a platform that is safe for the brand.

What is one challenge you have had to overcome since beginning your journey?

Finding product market fit. We have under taken 1 major and a number of minor pivots to get to this point. However, the learnings along the way have been completely worth it.

Tell us about where you think Collider can add the most value to you over the next four months.

I think collider will open up doors that we could previously never do. It is also a huge stamp of approval, giving us extra validation as we roll out to brands.

What advice would you give to founders who are applying to accelerator programmes?

Look at the kind of businesses that they accept and only apply to ones that are relevant to you – you could waste weeks filling in forms and wasting time when you don’t fit the mould. Then when you find one that works, through everything at it!

The EU Referendum and Innovation

With the most important vote of our generation within 24 hours, the Collider team would like to tackle the issue through the innovation lens aimed at startups. Whether that be in or out of the EU.

Bremain

The ‘Brexit’ anxiety has seen the FTSE 100 dropping daily. Similar trends have been mirrored in start-up investment, as many worry companies may struggle in a post-EU London. Many believe a connected Europe is important for investment in UK start-ups. London Mayor Sadiq Khan claims London has the opportunity to become “tech capital of the world” but worries tech development will struggle to maintain its exponential growth without initial investment.

Techcrunch writes a “closed-off Britain could threaten your very existence” as a start-up.

Start-ups must decide where to base their company and the answer is almost always London. But an EU exit may see this change. John Bradford’s poll on Twitter asking followers which city they would move to next had Dublin coming out on top. Also foreign entrepreneurs may look elsewhere as leaving would “stop young scientists from migrating freely within Europe”.

Also, EU funding will be lost if the UK public decide out is best. With the EU’s Horizon 2020 promising approximately 74.8 billion between 2014 and 2020. This will go directly to science, engineering and technology developers. If Thursday’s vote see’s us out, this research could cost 20 percent more. For start-ups and MadTech, this may not be significant in the short term.. But future technology may suffer, as this may be a deterrent seeing entrepreneurs less likely to take a chance.

Brexit

‘Brexit’ campaigners question EU regulation effects on innovation. Continued imposing of standards will affect the “most innovative economy in Europe”. Indirect taxation (“costs associated with the bloc’s endless regulations”) is an example of this. The effect is hard to measure, but it could be valid in terms of seeing a larger margin to reinvest back.

EU membership could affect start-ups through weekly payments from the UK. At £163m weekly, austerity measures could be lifted. But, this is speculation and we must confess austerity is made in Westminster, not in Brussels. So it’s a stretch to assume leaving the EU will result in a Keynesian approach to government spending.

A major element to the ‘Brexit’ debate is that the UK should follow the Norway model who gets access to Earth’s largest single market without sacrificing its sovereignty. Innovation in Norway has not been limited, despite being separated from the EU as they are leading growth in health innovation.

The EU debate is very current, but the future of remaining is often ignored; many assuming few changes. As in 2017 the EU aims to open the Unified Patent Court, which The Register have claimed “will make it much easier for patent trolls (a company that specialises in suing legitimate innovative businesses) and corporations in the US to reach into the UK and strangle your startup at birth”.

So…?

We encourage you to go to the polls today regardless of whether you’re for Bremain or Brexit. Still unsure? Collider portfolio company Miappi are curating some of the social debate. Check that out here