Unilever talks start up partnerships at Collider annual demo day
Unilever talked up its relationships with startups at yesterday’s (22 March) annual Collider demo day and said that by embracing the ‘Mad Tech’ landscape of its brands, which include Dove and Lynx, its consumer engagement rates are 30-40 per cent more effective.
Discussing Unilever Foundry’s relationship with start up Find The Ripple, which helps brands, agencies and editors to do in-moment marketing, head of the Foundry, Jeremy Bassett, said that there is a “strong financial case” for partnering up.
“What we looked at was that start ups were bringing to us tech that was more efficient and effective and it was often half cost of how we traditionally engage with people and normally about 30-40 per cent more effective as well. So we started to build a strong financial case around why we were investing in start ups and scaling that up.”
During the demo a number of brands and agencies spoke about the success of working with startups including Haymarket and Exterion Media, with the latter’s partnership’s director Dan Cresta advising brands looking to work with start ups to reduce the need for legal teams to get involved until necessary and to get more people in the business involved.
Presenting in front of the audience at the demo day, which tool place at Digitas LBI’s Brick Lane office, were seven start ups, which has been whittled down from 250 applications from 40 different countries. Each received £50,000 in funding for 11 per cent of their equity as part of joining the programme.
They were Advifi, an open programmatic WiFi ad platform that links venues that provide free WiFi with relevant advertisers; Goopi, a video content creation platform; Hotstreet, which creates customer profiles via local marketing, analytics and geo-behaviour; Kout, which allows any e-commerce website to capture data and value from customers who are not ready to buy just yet, by integrating games at point of sale, giving customers a chance to win the products for a fraction of the retail price; Release, which helps online businesses to acquire new customers using refer a friend marketing; Rtobjects, a Cloud Platform delivering personal interactive movie experiences to help brands tell new stories.and ScoopRetail, a digital platform for the physical retail environment.
The overall winner of the day as chosen by the demo day audience was Goopi, which helps boost campaign performance with dynamic video ads.
More and more brands and agencies are investing in start ups including Publicis which recently announced it will support 90 digital projects and start-ups with the most business potential through funding and mentoring to celebrate its 90th birthday.