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Irish Times FUSION is an initiative that matches the energy of Ireland’s startup community with the enormous market access of the branding and advertising world.

This week LaunchPad mentor Gary Leyden coaches the startups on lean business canvass, and Patrick McConville, media buyer for ICAN, advises them on how to pitch major brands. The Grand Finale pitch on 14 June will be unlike any pitch the startups have given before. The audience will not be VC and angel investors, but media buyers who control the advertising budges the majority of consumer brands in the market.

See more at irishtimesidealab.com

This week mentors including Jason Nebenzahl, Managing Director of PHD (media agency) and Sean Blanchfield, Founder of DemonWare and CEO of ScaleFront, work with the startups inside The Irish Times.

Irish Times FUSION is an initiative that matches the energy of Ireland’s startup community with the enormous market access of the branding and advertising world. See more at irishtimesidealab.com

Each startup was pitching for a place among the final 10…

Drum roll…

More drum roll…

The final ten startups are:

FrockAdvisor

Sian’s Plan

D2E

ParkYa

GetHealth

Loylap

Fonesense

Prowlster

Buzzoo

Limetree

See profiles of the startups on Irishtimes.com.

[Note: Embeddable HD video links below.]

The Irish Times works with startups to redefine advertising. 

The Irish Times will unveil the results of Irish Times FUSION, an experimental startup initiative to define the next wave of digital advertising, at an invite-only event for the leaders of the global media and advertising industry in Dublin, Ireland, on 14 June.

Twenty startups were shortlisted from over 100 entries to enter the 154 year old newspaper’s building in early May to develop their products in to new brand experiences.

According to Dr Johnny Ryan, The Irish Times’ Chief Innovation Officer,  “We are matching the energy of the startup community with the enormous market access of the branding and advertising world. The advertising and branding industry is an untapped channel to reach the world’s consumers. Irish Times FUSION enables startups to work with The Irish Times to tap this channel and kickstart their businesses growth. At the same time, advertising agencies need to develop compelling digital experiences. Fusing the startup with the advertiser creates a win-win, and enables us to lead with innovative advertising inventory”.

Within a week of entering The Irish Times the twenty startups were culled to a final ten by an industry panel of the market’s most senior media buyers. Among the judges was Steve Latham of The Cannes Lions, the premier festival of the global advertising industry. After the pitches Latham said, “I can definitely see these ideas on stage at Cannes as potential Lion winners”.

The startups are working in the heart of The Irish Times’ building, on the Editor’s floor, and have access to the entire organisation. Their presence is part of a reshaping of the organization for the digital era. Liam Kavanagh, Managing Director of The Irish Times Group, said “There was a risk. If we did not embrace the digital disruptors when they arrived that would have said serious things about whether the organization could change. I took the risk. My faith paid off.”

The final ten startups in the building are working with NDRC LaunchPad (the top incubator in Ireland according to the Kauffman Foundation). At the same time, they are working closely with The Irish Times’ own staff, and with Ireland’s leading media buyers and branding industry mentors.

Over the course of the FUSION program each startup will have pitched global industry leaders including Emily Hare, managing editor of Contagious Magazine, plus senior representatives from The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Cannes Lions, and WAN-IFRA, the world association of news publishers, which includes some 18,000 publications and 13,000 websites.

FUSION is a follow up to The Irish Times Digital Challenge, an experiment with early stage digital startups that the media organisation ran in 2012.  Since its original startup program other media organizations including the New York Times and BBC Worldwide have launched their own incubator programmes.  The Irish Times was among the first half dozen newspapers in the world to launch an online edition in 1994.

For more information see http://www.irishtimesidealab.com

Embeddable HD video

Video of week 1 http://vimeo.com/66745290 [introduction to the initiative]
Video of week 2 http://vimeo.com/67205683 [startups pitch the media panel]

Images:
http://irishtimesidealab.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Group-shot.jpg 

ENDS

For media queries:

Paul Healy, The Irish Times +353 1 675 8000 / phealy@irishtimes.com

After a three day period of creative workshops the initial shortlist of 20 startups started an accelerated version of the NDRC LaunchPad, ranked Ireland’s number one incubator by the Kauffman Foundation. The startups have one week to prepare for the pitch to an industry panel that will decide which final ten startups of the shortlisted twenty will proceed to the next stage of the process.

FrockAdvisor

Sian’s Plan

D2E

ParkYa

GetHealth

Loylap

Fonesense

Prowlster

Buzzoo

Limetree

See profiles of the startups on Irishtimes.com.

The final ten startups were selected by a panel of Ireland’s leading media buyers including Tyson Pearcey of Mindshare, Shenda Loughnane of Aegis, Paul Farrell of Initiative, Patrick McConville of ICAN, Garret O’Beirne of OMD, and Jason Nebenzahl of PHD, plus Steve Latham of The Cannes Lions.

And along the way we are working with The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, and the international media (through WAN-IFRA, an association of 18,000+ outlets) to provide Ireland’s startups with the widest possible base for growth and validation. We have the top deck of the advertising and branding industry participating too: The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and Contagious are both participating in the selection process.

Ireland is a great place to be a startup, but a hard market in which to scale and reach many users. The advertising and branding industry is an untapped channel to reach the world’s consumers. Irish Times FUSION enables startups to work with The Irish Times to tap this channel and kickstart your businesses growth.

The call to startups in April was open to any digital startup (including, for example, communities, apps, services, sites, or other technologies), irrespective of whether their business was involved with advertising or not. Participating startups did not need any history of advertising industry involvement.

The idea: advertising at a historic pivot point

Read more about this in a longer version at Contagious

An understandable malaise in ad agencies surrounds all things digital. Low revenues on the one hand and a new answerability to metrics on the other are accompanied by a sense that digital formats remain largely underdeveloped, and that new, possibly unwelcome, surprises await. This is a moment of uncertainty. But it is also an opportunity to build an entirely new avant-garde.

The advertising and branding industry is at a historical pivot point between the established print and video formats, which are ‘flat’ in the sense that they are looked upon or heard, and new digital formats, which are ‘experiences’ in the sense that they are used rather than merely observed. The stars of this new experience-building avant-garde will be engineers and inventors. As the impact of the advertising engineer/inventor grows, the advertisement will begin to look more like a product in its own right, much as some advertisements came to be identified as art in their own right over a century ago.

Coopting the engineer at the right hand of the art director requires a radical shift in thinking. Advertising has form in embracing the new. In the 1920s, for example, advertisements were quick to exploit the work of the surrealist artists, employing them to call to the consumer’s subconscious. This latest shift can be made by pairing advertising creatives and agencies with tech startups.

The relationship benefits both parties. The startup brings new, compelling experiences to the market. Some of these may provide new and unexpected channels for brand messages. Yet the startup must reach consumers, and has limited funds to do so. The ad industry, which commands market penetration, can solve this problem. The startup must learn the correct market fit, validating its offering through feedback from users and accumulated metrics. Established industry players can facilitate this and become master of metrics in the process.

Irish Times FUSION as an experiment to match the energy of the startup community with the market access of the branding and advertising industry. We are working with startups whose focus is not on new advertising solutions per se, but all varieties of new, compelling experiences for end-users. FUSION brings startups working on products as varied as apps, widgets, communities etc. into The Irish Times where they will work with creatives to develop experimental inventory, and test live on our digital platforms to gather metrics.

Working with startups that have no prior interest in advertising will not comfortable, but it will produce shockingly original forms of inventory, and will guide us to a new confidence in experimenting. It is invention, alone, that will remove advertising’s digital malaise.

——–

Congratulations to all of you Fusionistas on making it this far.

I’m happy to help you get your brand story straight.

As consumers, we mostly buy brands, and buy in to brands based not just on their functionality or livery, but on our perception of the values of that brand.

More and more, people want to know what a brand stands for; in a world where church, state and banks have failed, people increasingly quiz brands on their integrity (look at the scrutiny of A&F right now, or the questions around Google tax practices).

Your brand values will reside not just in your actions but in your tone of voice. So you need to decide those values at an early stage- or as soon as your brand speaks.

Try to answer the following questions.

Who is your target?

(It’s not unusual btw to have a primary and a secondary target.)
In defining your target, include an insight you have into the situation and mindset of the people you’re aiming at. Are you solving a problem? Meeting a previously unmet need? Are you bringing good news?

What is your brand’s tone of voice? What do you want it to be famous for? 

Many brands look for the holy grail- of being able to encapsulate their brand promise in a single word; i.e. Volkswagen and Reliability.

But decide whether you want to have Authority and Practicality or Friendliness and Accessibility, or a different combination of these attributes.

Are you a ‘trusted guide’ or an ‘understanding friend’?

Are you stylish/down-to-earth, emotional/rational?

Are you for life, or just for Christmas?

Will you strive for clear and error-free communications or is that not something you’re bothered about? Where does your brand stand on issues of sustainability or sourcing of product? What sort of corporate citizen will you be?

The more answers you have to these questions the more informed and informing your communications will be- whether that’s in web content, packaging, social media or ad campaign.

(Think about the brands you like or admire and chances are you can answer some of these questions about those brands or imagine you can- which may also be a positive.)

Have a go at putting some responses down. Then if you need help, or just want to use me as a sounding board, email and I’ll make time for you.

On another note, I’ve already linkedin with some of you but am happy to accept invites.

Best,
-Eoghan

Eoghan Nolan
Creative Director & Founder
Brand Artillery