Brand communication: Strategists, techies join heads for digital marketing solutions

Around 66 teams try to devise a low-cost digital marketing plan for a brand.

KARACHI: To offer creative, unique and practical solutions through various digital platforms to help marketers in their marketing and brand communication efforts, the first of its kind hackathon was organised at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan in Karachi on Wednesday.

Around 66 teams of three to five students and practitioners participated in the Crackit 2013 hosted by the Pakistan Advertisers' Society (PAS). The event was open to all.



The task was to devise a guerrilla marketing plan for an XYZ company which had decided to enter the touchscreen segment with a set target market and specific price points ranging from Rs9,000-Rs22,000. The plan had to be extremely low-cost with an almost zero budget, which meant no mainstream advertising mediums, such as billboards.

After a briefing by the Szabist Media Sciences Coordinator Salman Abiden, the teams comprising developers, designers, and strategists, proceeded to their allotted rooms to tackle the challenge within a set time frame.

"We expect to see solutions," said Abiden, adding that set templates have been provided so that each team gets a level-playing field to present their ideas. "We are not looking for advertising campaigns, ideas related to the social media or any e-commerce solutions. We want to move beyond the common strategy and engage the potential consumers by coming up with applications, a game, a content delivery system and so on."

He was of the view that they wanted the contestants to identify the problem, create a strategy and deliver a solution.

PAS Executive Director Qamar Abbas stated that there were two main objectives of the hackathon - to provide a platform to students and small companies who may have brilliant ideas but not an opportunity to present it to a big brand and to present a hackathon that brings together marketing specialists and techies.

"The concept is not just to float ideas, instead we will, by the end of the day, have prototypes of solutions even if they're not the end product."

Abbas said that since many ideas are generated outside the company itself, the hackathon was a good way to work on them in a short time frame.

At the end of the day, when the final buzzer went off, a four-member team called Purpleray Digital provided feedback on their experience. "This hackathon was definitely a good initiative as it provided a holistic view of what the real world entails.  The overall experience was worthwhile, although there was a glitch when the internet went down in between."

The team members added that cracking the brief was challenging as it took up a lot of time since it wasn't detail oriented. "By the end, we came up with an application and a microsite."

The first round of CrackIt will also be held in Lahore on October 12.

The top 10 teams shortlisted in this competition will be asked to give presentations for the second and final round of the competition to be held on October 23, after which the list will be narrowed down to three. The winning team, set to receive a cash award of Rs150,000, will be announced at the PAS Digital Marketing and Advertising Conference Dig-It 2.0 scheduled for October 30-31.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2013.