Innovation is not an event

**This post originally appeared on The Drum**

Everytime I go to an agency, the first word out of their mouths, 90 per cent of the time, is ‘innovation’. Either I am speaking with the head of innovation, or the head of mobile has dropped the I-word in the first few minutes. They have embraced it in their vision, but are trying to figure out how to bring it inside the organisation.

One way agencies do this is by holding ‘innovation days’. A handful of startups are brought into the agency and asked to pitch their ideas to a room full of account managers eager to hear exciting new tech ideas from the startups. The account managers at best go away with something new to talk about with colleagues and maybe clients, but it rarely goes beyond ‘that was interesting’.

For a company that has less than 10 employees, the cofounders will usually attend an event like this. They think it’s a quick way to get in front of people in agencies who they believe will lead them to the brands and a commercial deal. The founders give up their very scarce time to come and meet them and go away with nothing – not even feedback on the product/pricing – really valuable insight that agencies have.

Often the startups don’t get the opportunity to discuss the key challenges facing the account managers/brands and how best their tech can solve them either. They aren’t given the opportunity to work on their products and make the necessary changes to get the right product/market fit. Without a dialogue, the best startups will not bother coming back to the agency – and we are already seeing this happen.

Innovation should not be thought of as an event. These ‘innovation days’ are the beginning of the process, but they aren’t innovation, nor can you ‘do’ innovation in these days. What can you really learn from a startup from 10-minute pitch anyway? Just the very nature of the set-up ‘pitch’ means that it’s a one way monologue, not a dialogue.

There must be next steps in place for startups to keep coming back. You, as the agency, must initiate the follow-up. Set the expectations on your staff to take action on what they have seen in just a few hours. Open up a dialogue, introduce them to others in your agency, or recommend them. Your colleagues might have ideas you haven’t thought of. Because if there is no follow-up, believe that the best startups will not be coming back. They have a million other things to be getting on with, another showcase is not on the top of their list.

Collider12 Alumnus Avocarrot raises $2M

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We’ve got big news from the US – Collider12 alumnus Avocarrot have just closed a $2M seed round! We’re so happy for the guys, who moved to San Francisco after participating in the first Collider programme in London. Their round is made up of investors Giorgos Zacharia, Darling Ventures, Odyssey Ventures L.P. After an exclusive VentureBeat article provided some insights into the native mobile ad space, we had the chance to get down to the details with Co-Founder Conno Christou. Read on for some insights into working across the pond, raising funding, and the challenges of running a multi-national company from Conno.

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•         What were some of the struggles and opportunities you faced when moving to SF?

The biggest struggle is to find a way to network and get out the word for the company to a totally new audience in a new environment with brutal competition and noise. There’s not a standard recipe to succeed on this, however the 3 tips from me would be to try and keep your confidence levels high at all costs, to listen carefully even if you don’t necessarily agree and to be as specific as possible when asking for favours.

If you re a first timer and you'll learn by doing, then by definition you'll make a lot of mistakes that will seem silly to you after a while. The large abundance of potential clients, partners and investors in Silicon Valley will help you accelerate this learning process to nail your pitch and understand better the mechanics of the game. Remember to listen carefully to what everybody has to say.

•         This is a big seed round of funding. How will you manage the money and how far are you expecting it to take you?

In Europe this might be one of the biggest seed rounds so far, however in Silicon Valley it is rather the norm. A general rule of thumb is that you get the money for 12-18 months runway. In our case, we'll mostly invest in expanding the team with exceptional people both in SF and Europe, while at the same time market the ad exchange to both app developers and demand sources.

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•         How did you choose your investors for this round and how long did it take? Was it what you anticipated?

It was much worse than we thought - both in terms of time and resources but also in terms of energy consumption and expectations. The VC game in SV is extremely different compared to Europe and the time to adapt to the new rules might be underestimated. A VC once told me that bad fundraising looks like a 100 no’s and a successful one like 99 no’s. As you see, continuous rejections are part of the process, which at some point makes you question your own credibility and value, resulting to low confidence. Remember that if you lose your confidence then you lose the game.

•         You have some of your team based in Greece and others in SF with visits back and forth to London. What are some of the highlights and pitfalls of running an international company?

You get to see lots of different people and replicate processes to create a quick buzz in new territories, given that you know what you re doing. The challenge is that you have to be disciplined and systematic on how to maintain excellent communication bridges between the distributed teams. A catalyst here is to create strong, well-defined processes and find ways to enforce them so that the team embraces them and doesn't reject them.

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•         What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in the MadTech space who are looking to raise a similar round to you?

The mobile adtech space is a huge space that is kind of doomed and blessed at the same time. Doomed because there s a lot of noise and few successes; blessed because unlike the web adtech landscape, there are no dominant players in the mobile space yet, so there s a huge opportunity to be amongst the first ones.

If you re looking to get money, then start meeting with VCs at least a month earlier to start getting to know them under no time pressure. If you have a rockstar team and a strong vision then you have pretty good chances to secure a seed round. If you manage to report steep hockey sticks in your KPI graphs then you have great chances for a big seed. Don’t give up and stay confident. 99 no’s is the norm..

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From Moment.us to Preceptiv: A Pivotal Journey

** This is a guest post from Andrew Ko, Co-Founder of Preceptiv **

Pivoting. The very definition means to turn on or around a central point, and this is what we did as a business. Our central point was the idea that useful insights for companies could be extracted from people’s music listening behaviours. This main idea has never changed since the beginning of our journey. However, the way we went about it before our pivot is completely different to how we are going about it now. Let me explain...

The company started out with the BIG IDEA of revolutionizing the way advertising was experienced and consumed. This concept got us into the Collider programme in London and jump started our road to the 'Billion Pound' idea. We created our own free streaming music app (no ads or subscription fee) with the hopes of gaining traction rapidly and attracting advertisers onto our platform.

Describing our music player in a nutshell, it displayed other people’s “moments” (hence our first company name: Moment.Us) with the song you were currently listening to so that you can experience what they experienced when they were listening to that same song. This created a more social and connected music listening experience and was a fun way to discover new music socially, an idea that I still hope gets implemented in the future by one of the larger players (ie. Spotify, Google, etc). The app was also beautiful, which was usually the first thing a new user would tell us. It was iOS 7 flat design before iOS 7 was released by Apple. So we thought we had everything tied down: the concept, the platform and the music licenses. Now all we needed was to convince brands to start putting their ads in there and we’d be in business because, I mean, how hard could it possibly be to attract a million users to our platform while giving away free full-length songs?

But what was that saying again? “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Yeah, that’s what happened to us. It wasn’t for lack of trying though, as our team did its very best to make it a success. But when we approached brands or advertisers, we ran into a few problems. The three most common were:

1. They wouldn’t get on board without the user numbers
2. They wanted to see proof that it worked before they committed
3. They wouldn’t pay for the music royalties

We essentially ran into the 'chicken-and-egg' scenario in which we couldn’t get advertisers on board if we didn’t have enormous amounts of traction, but we wouldn’t be able to pay for the amount of music we were giving away unless we had revenue coming from the advertisers.

We also learned that giving away free music didn’t help sell the app (trying to buy word-of-mouth advertising) and that we actually needed money for marketing.

The numbers our app generated told a two-sided story:

In terms of user numbers to appease brands and get them on board, it was quite small. We managed to attract around 3000 users from the UK on word-of-mouth marketing as our app was limited to UK iOS users only (due to music license and resource restrictions).

However, in terms of engagement numbers, it was through the roof (higher than Facebook sponsored posts) and people found this way of music discovery extremely enjoyable.

Based on the feedback we received, we knew that our concept of using music to connect people was solid but the way we delivered it was just too expensive for anyone to buy into. So now what?

We had to pivot fast as we were running out of time and money. So we took our special sauce (our knowledge in connecting music with people’s experiences), threw out the delivery mechanism (the streaming music app) and started over again.

Music + Personality

We knew that our strength was linking music to people’s behaviours, experiences and identities so we decided to start there.

One of the key elements that people liked about our app was using music to determine someone’s state of mind. But what if we could also use music to determine not just someone’s state of mind at a particular time, but also their personality overall. This was actually a part of my PhD research; how music can be used to figure out people’s identities or personalities. The reason being that there really is nothing more personal than the music we listen to.

Armed with this new idea (and a new name: Preceptiv), we set off to verify that we could build such an engine. Drawing on previous academic research in this field, our mission was to turn raw quantitative music listening data into rich, insightful qualitative data that can be used to profile people’s personalities.

Why personalities you ask? Because we looked at the current state of the customer analytics market and they only profile users in two-dimensions - demographics and behaviours. However, the key to our technology is that it enables companies to profile their customers in three-dimensions by adding the key missing variable: psychometrics. This additional signal informs companies the motivations behind their customers’ actions and enables them to take the appropriate action to increase engagement, conversion and loyalty.

I’ll give you a very simple example: If Expedia knew that Joe (who’s 35 and lives in San Francisco) recently took a trip to Vietnam and they wanted to recommend him other places to visit, they’d probably suggest other trips to Southeast Asia just based on the fact that he went to Vietnam but not knowing what he did while he was there. However, if Expedia also knew that Joe is the adventurous type and likes thrills (because of his personality type), they could also send him more relevant and meaningful recommendations such as a safari trip to Africa or a volcano hiking excursion in Hawaii (which is closer to home for him). It’s been scientifically proven that a key aspect of what drives us through life and motivates our actions is through our personality. Being able to tap into this insight is incredibly powerful, and to do it on mobile devices (instead of solely on the web) is a dream for most companies.

This is actually what our secret sauce is all about and why we’re extremely excited about our pivot. We’ve cracked how to gather all of this data on mobile devices in seconds, with the same accuracy as a 50-question personality test, and without the user having to provide any input manually. It only takes minutes to harness the power of our technology, as its just a simple SDK being dropped into a mobile app. However, we realize that music is subjective so we need to continue collecting data, testing and refining our model in order to provide as accurate a view about people’s personalities as possible.

And that’s what we’re doing right now. Once we prove this works, there are a whole range of applications and companies that could benefit from the results of our experiment (we’re currently targeting the retail, financial and travel verticals). We’ve had great responses so far, trialling the technology with a few companies and getting useful feedback to refine our model. But we’re not done yet. All of this work is required for our journey towards the holy grail of startups: product / market fit. It’s taken us quite a while to get to this point, with a lot of twists and turns, but it’s definitely been worth it.

How can MadTech brands & agencies stay ahead?

** This article first appeared in The Drum **

Two weeks ago, we held the Collider Class of 2015 Demo Day. Almost 200 people came to see a showcase of the best global marketing and adtech startups in central London, and give the audience an overview of where the industry is heading. Nine startups, six minutes each, four panellists, three co-founders and one UK trending hashtag. We worked tirelessly to make sure the right people were in the room to have effective synergy.

We brought together people from all of London’s biggest and best brands and agencies. From Aegis, Camelot, dunnhumby, Haymarket, Havas Media, Ogilvy & Mather Group UK, and many more, these individuals were some of the first in their organisations to be fully immersed in innovation. They were not only passive observers, but active engagers. They also inadvertently participated in two powerful, culture shifts:

They were being exposed to some of the best relevant tech to their industries The theme of our Demo Day was to ‘inspire confidence’. We wanted people to feel comfortable in thinking outside the box, not be afraid to ask questions and imagine ways in which they could integrate new tech and working styles into their companies. People had to be ready to think critically about what they were seeing, but not make critical judgements. We encouraged thinking about how these startups could fit into long-term strategy – about the returns in years’ time as opposed to months. And because the audience was so responsive, brands and agencies approached our startups and set up meetings straight away.

They were in a space with their competition, learning with them and getting to know them One of the things Collider is trying to incorporate into the culture of the marketing and advertising industry is the idea of collaboration. One of the forms this comes in is working with a third party, like us, to provide outside expertise. And sometimes that means coming face to face with your competition. We currently have three different agencies signed up as partners. Everyone is constantly learning from their competition – either in formal talks or informal coffee chats. It is great to see agencies coming together in ways they wouldn’t have three years ago. This is a measurable change in the industry mindset.

I am a big advocate of serendipity – taking the chance that you will be able to find answers to your problems in unexpected places. Half the battle is knowing where to look, even if you don’t know what to look for.

We are building one solution to this – by bringing the right people together at the right time and giving each party the tools to have effective conversations. It’s called MadTech.

Introducing: Powr of You

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**We will be profiling each company joining Collider’s Class of 2015. Take the time to learn a bit more about them and keep an eye on what’s to come over the next few months!**

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Who are you and what do you do?

Powr of You is a data marketplace for consumers and brands to learn and earn from each other.

With Powr of You, Consumers learn about their online footprint and quantified self through beautiful visualizations, while they earn rewards with our revenue share model. Brands learn about their consumers' cross-platform habits, interests, media consumption to make data backed decisions to improve marketing ROI. Brands also earn consumer confidence and loyalty by being consumer privacy champions.

Our consumer facing site is live at www.powrofyou.com and the brand analytics site is in beta being developed alongside pilot partners.

Who are your co-founders & give us one line about each of you!

We are a brother-sister duo. Our quest to answer the question "Why don't we [consumers] get paid for all the data we create?" led us to create Powr of You.

Keshav is a tech geek, a recent alumnus from London Business School with strategy and risk consulting background at Deloitte prior to his MBA and at LinkedIn and Telefonica during the MBA.

Shruti brings ideas and solutions to reality, with over seven years experience spanning strategy, operations and technology consulting with Accenture focused on Consumer Goods, Healthcare and Retail, before and after an MBA from London Business School.

Where in the world are your headquarters?

Headquarters are London, UK

What excites you most about London (one startup point and one non-startup point!)?

London has a bursting startup scene and that brings a lot of excitement, visibility and support for early stage startups. On a more personal note, it’s a new home for us. After living in India and the San Francisco Bay Area for most of our life, we weren’t expecting to love a city as much as we love London, in all its flavours of people, industries, and culture.

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What insight (competitive advantage, new perspective etc.) are you bringing to the Madtech industry?

Data is the currency of tomorrow. And that’s what we’re helping people enterprise on by building Powr of You. We are changing the Madtech industry by bringing consumers to the table. Instead of being unknowing bystanders, we are giving people an active role to understand and realize value from their data footprint. People also have the opportunity to view their own lifestyle in a quantified way to understand their own online brand and habits through personal insights.

On the other hand, we’re truly bringing marketers closer to their consumers. We’re using consumer’s opt-in data to drive up-to-date, accurate, cross-platform insights about consumer behaviour to improve the return on their marketing investment by being more relevant to their consumers.

What is one challenge you have had to overcome since beginning your journey?

The biggest challenge was building something with our big vision in mind but in a resource constrained setup. In our professional careers there has been an abundance of resources to tap into, which is starkly different than our startup journey.

Tell us about how Collider can (and hopefully will) help you over the next four months.

We are very excited to be part of the Collider 2015 Cohort! It has been an invaluable chance for us to sit across the table from client decision makers of major brands and agencies, Unilever, Ogilvy, Camelot, and Havas Media - to name a few. Simply put, Collider has propelled us significantly towards finding the product-market fit rapidly through exposure to their brand and agency partners, their mentors, and their investors.

We started the program, and continue, with the thought: "Let's do this!"

Here's a funny fact you didn't know about us!

We both love to dance, especially Bollywood.

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