HACKATHON

TitleHACKATHON
BrandBOUVET
Product/ServiceBOUVET
Category A05. Live Broadcast / Live Streaming
Entrant REDINK Oslo, NORWAY
Idea Creation REDINK Oslo, NORWAY
Media Placement REDINK Oslo, NORWAY
Production REDINK Oslo, NORWAY
Production 2 MOLTE Oslo, NORWAY
Credits
Name Company Position
Katrine Øyvåg Redink Advisor
Pål André Skogen Redink Editor
Andreas Luksepp Redink Photographer
Silje Kristine Andersen Redink Performance specialist
Marie Bjørnskau Redink Project Manager
Tina Natalie Rueda Redink Production Manager

Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?

By combining two familiar concepts for the target audience with professional production, we managed to capture their attention and make the client stand out among their competitors. Young professional developers are familiar with live streaming and instant connection with the people on screen – and with the concept of a hackathon. By combining these elements we managed to both engage the audience, the whole client organization and reach our overall goal of making the client more attractive to prospective employees.

Background

The competition for talent in the IT sector is at an all-time high. Prospective employees are contacted by recruitment agencies on a weekly basis, but our research shows that this tactic is not very effective in getting the best talent to consider switching jobs – and in the worst case might even hurt the company's image in the eyes of prospective employees. Bouvet, one of the biggest IT consultancy firms in Norway, was lagging behind their main competitors when it came to awareness and consideration among developers with 3-5 years experience. They wanted a new approach to their recruitment process with the goal of upping these parameters and attracting more talent. For the main, attention-grabbing part of the campaign, the goal was to collect data and gather an audience which had demonstrated an interest in IT development. This way they could be reached with more content at a later stage.

Describe the creative idea

To reach a picky, tech-savvy audience with a message that communicated both the unique culture among the employees and their professional skills, we decided to combine two familiar concepts – a hackathon and live-streaming. Live-streaming on platforms such as Twitch.tv is already well-established in the target audience, and they expect to be able to interact with the people on screen directly. The hackathon-format, where one ore more teams gather to work intensively on a problem for a given amount of time, is also well-known – but combining the two and adding in professional-grade production is a new idea. The resulting concept was a live-streamed 24-hour hackathon where the public could both vote on the task and help solving it during the event. Combined with a well-planned and produced operation, we created a live-stream which kept the attention of the target audience for the whole duration of the event.

Describe the strategy

Because of the target groups affinity for personal recommendations and closed networks, we hypothesized that activating the organization itself was of utmost importance. Only by getting the people already working at Bouvet to share the content with their networks would we be able to make a meaningful impact. In addition, we chose to run hyper-targeted ads on an under-utilized platform in our market: Reddit. With a large share of developers in their user base we would be able to get a big share of the attention on the platform. By involving the audience, both internal and external, from day one, we wanted to let everyone feel like they had some ownership in the project. Within two weeks more than 2500 people voted on which project they wanted the developers to solve – and the winner was probably the hardest task: Help reduce oceanic plastic waste.

Describe the execution

In the last days leading up to the hackathon, we ran reminder ads on both Reddit, YouTube and Facebook – where the last two platform utilized data from the landing page of the voting. A setup with five stationary cameras, one moving camera and screen-sharing of all computers gave us a wide variety of options to keep the stream engaging at all times. With visits from local government and the CEO, various activities and virtual visits from the developer’s families in the wee hours of the morning, the viewers always had something to keep them engaged. A code repository on GitHub utilized the power of crowd-sourcing by making it possible for viewers to contribute to the project directly while watching the stream. After 24 hours, the result was a working prototype of a garbage-collecting system which will credit a user’s account with money whenever they return a bag of plastic.

Describe the outcome

A highly engaged audience ended up viewing a total of more than 2000 hours of the live stream – divided on around 5000 unique users. With an average view time of almost 20 minutes, we could be certain that we managed to engage the right audience and keep the stream entertaining throughout the project. Including the teaser video and various content afterwards, the combined view-count surpassed 60.000 – with a 45 per cent view rate for YouTube ads. During the campaign period the traffic to Bouvet’s website doubled, and users spent 1950 hours engaging with hackathon-content. 16 per cent of the estimated Norwegian user base on Reddit visited Bouvet’s website within the period – and we also got press coverage of the event in multiple niche-publications. The most important part, however, is the audiences which interacted with the content – which Bouvet will be able to target further.