Living and working in the Bay Area, it’s easy to get sucked
into the tech bubble which often seems very detached from the big brands on the
East coast and certainly, the advertising world of Madison Avenue.
However, maybe they aren’t quite as far apart as it might appear. You only need to look at the ads for jobs in the creative industry to see the premium salaries paid to people who combine creative and technology skills. This is increasingly driven by the fact that so many great ideas are made possible by the clever things you can do with technology.
As brands look to find innovative ways to engage their
existing and potential customers, a good place to start looking is Silicon
Valley. Many companies, such as Walmart and Toys ‘R Us, are already going down
this route by establishing an innovation center in Silicon Valley, albeit on
very different scales. However, that’s not always possible.
There is an alternative to investing big bucks for setting up an office. We are currently working with Brand Garage (www.brandgarage.com) and a big client to
run a Brand Hackathon to which we will
be recruiting 40-50 teams of developers. It is a model that Brand Garage has already
successfully executed with Home Depot and Kraft foods and imminently with Sears
(http://brandgarage.co/dev-center/)
The goal is to solve a specific brand problem, but the
important part is the opportunities for teams representing startups that
already have some awesome technologies but don’t necessarily have the market
traction that a big brand can bring.
At
least one startup from the event will be guaranteed to work with and develop a prototype with
the brand. It’s a ‘win – win – win’, for the brand, the startup and the
agency. The brand gets access to the latest technology to solve a problem, the
startup gains a new route to market for its technology, the agency ensures the
brand gets the best possible product to drive engagement for a specific launch.
Over the course of three days, a brand can’t solve its
innovation woes. It is, however, a great way to kick
start innovation. Rather than innovation solely being driven from within, there
is a great opportunity for brands to establish programs that tap into the
amazing talent and technologies that exist in Silicon Valley. For this approach
to be successful, both brands and agencies need to be open to the idea that not
everything has to be built themselves but that some of the best utilities a
brand can create will be built around technologies that already exist but just
need a friendly brand to bring to market.
