Last week, we held our 2nd ADTHINK of the year, a “Shark-Tank” style event where our panel of industry experts from Grey Adventures, Under Armour Connected Fitness, AT&T AdWorks and 72andSunny heard from our industry’s latest and greatest startups and how they are aiming to solve advertising and marketing’s biggest issues. Curated in collaboration with Redbooks, the event was sponsored by Davis & Gilbert LLP and hosted at the New York Institute of Technology.
Our returning moderator, Gina Waldhorn, Co-Founder and COO of Evol8tion, shared that over 100 million startups are created each year, which means there’s one created every 3 seconds! She then led a game of “Startup or Not?” where the audience had to determine whether or not some of the outlandish startups she presented were real.
We then shifted our attention to the impressive startup pitches that left our panelists amazed and full of questions:
- John Bowen, Co-Founder and SVP of Business Development at CrowdTwist, whose multichannel loyalty and engagement platform provides “soup to nuts” solutions, supplies marketers with a great source of data and opportunities for greater customer retention. They do this by driving new customers to their company and keep them engaged throughout the entire customer journey.
- Eventable, presented by Co-Founder and COO Akash Malhotra, is a marketing platform invented to help people use their calendars to remind them to take action. As calendars are the second-most used app after email, marketers can use this platform to drive timely, profitable action with the help of Eventable’s Dynamic ICS system that allows brands to modify their events with news and updates. Brands like FanDuel used this for the NBA Playoffs to share updates in the schedule resulting in an increase in user engagement, generating 39.4 impressions per user and a 99.6 retention rate.
- Knotch’s Co-Founder and CEO Anda Gansca shared the qualitative and quantitative capabilities of her app – Knotch provides marketers with data collected from consumer reactions to branded content. This app also allows marketers to see how well their campaign are faring and even help them make accurate comparisons with their competitors.
- Gil Eyal, Co-Founder and CEO, HYPR gave us insights on how to use this data abundant platform to effectively market with social influencers. The platform compiles the influencers’ data to provide marketers with real-time social analytics on these influencers around the world; it helps marketers determine the best influencer for their targeted demographic since simply having someone famous behind your brand will not necessarily result in sales if they’re not put in front of the right audience.
Gina also had some great questions for our panelists on influencers, data and loyalty. Here is what some of our executives had to say:
- Evan Kraut, Managing Director, Grey Adventures
“Influencers always pay off for brands and they’re always measurable. The difference is how they’re being measured. Data is the answer to resolving inefficiencies.”
- Doug Ziewacz, Head of North America Media & Advertising, Under Armour Connected Fitness
“Data is the new oil. To provide the best customer experience is to go from collecting and tracking information and data to tell customers what to do from it. Immerse customers into the complete ecosystem to not only meet their needs but also help them identify the needs they didn’t realize they had.”
- Andy Maskin, Lab Director, AT&T AdWorks
“Influencers who blow up organically draw attention to new forms of media and they’ve taken attention away from traditional media. The question that needs to be asked now is “How can they play a role in a new ecosystem?””
- Marshall Ball, Director of Strategy, 72andSunny
“Loyalty is great but there is too much focus on transactions. The best form of consumer engagement and retention is to build one around a narrative.”
After the panel, Gina introduced a survey to the audience where we learned that 38% percent of them were most excited about Virtual Reality in the tech sector, with Commerce coming in as a close second with 37%.
We want to thank Redbooks, our sponsor Davis & Gilbert LLP, NYIT, our moderator Gina Waldhorn, and our wonderful panelists and startups for making ADTHINK a success once again!
Don’t miss the next installment on August 3rd – Registration Now Open!