Wickes Brand Challenge

All right, here we go. We're going to be giving this bad boy away, as well as a 20K paid pilot, to one of six companies that is about to pitch over the next 45 minutes. My name is Jeremy Bassett and as Mark said, I run Coqed, an agency based here in London that helps the world's biggest brands work with the world's most innovative startups. And here's a 30-second overview of what we do. Maybe there we go. There we go. All right, it's time to go. So as a bit of an overview, we believe that the future already exists, it just hasn't been scaled, and there's a huge opportunity for brands to engage the future exists because startups have built it. And what we're doing here is connecting big brands with innovative startups to scale those innovations and get to the future faster. So if you're interested in this space, we've got opportunities for you to do that in your day-to-day work. In fact, it's Co-cubed. We track and monitor over 12 million startups. So if you've got a specific challenge, then we can find you a specific solution to that. Just let me know or any other team in the lab coats and we'd be happy to explore how we can connect you to our network. But you can also do that here at Mad Fest as well. There's an opportunity for you to speed date with startups right around at the House of Innovation, near the other entrance. And the way that works is you share your own challenge and then the team will curate five companies for you to meet in half an hour. So it's quite a bit of fun if you want to get involved in that. But here we're going to see one brand solve their challenge live here on stage. And to tell us more about that, please give it up for Paul and Gary.

Okay, yes, perfect. Thank you. Afternoon everyone. So Gary, Paul, tell us a little bit more about what you're doing at Wickes.

Perfect. And today we're looking at one specific challenge. I want to talk about the challenge that you've set and what you're looking for today.

Yeah, so as Gary just said, post-COVID we've got a new type of customer, and one of the challenges we have – and I think if anyone saw the Marmite challenge this morning, similar challenge to the guys from Marmite had – is actually how do you appeal to a younger, more novice kind of customer. And for us that's a DIY customer. And actually how do you give young DIY customers not just the confidence to shop at Wickes and take on some of those projects, but to get past some of that brand perception that Wickes is either for expert DIYers or just for the trade. So hopefully you want to see some really exciting pictures this afternoon.

Brilliant, we are indeed. Why don't you guys grab a seat. The way this is going to work is we're going to bring the startups one by one: three-minute pitch, two-minute Q&A. And then we'll invite Paul and Gary back to announce the winner as well. So it's all very sort of Shark Tank, Dragon's Den, but let's get this show on the road. So our first company solves the challenge for Wickes by looking at voice. From Say It Now, please give it up for Maria.

Oh, fun. Okay, well without further ado, thank you very much everybody, and we are here to talk about Wickes. And I'm really excited about this because we're talking about Gen Z. And the solution that we have I think is going to be very, very interesting. I am Maria Cadbury from Say It Now. Our goal is to make it possible to engage with all ads using your voice. To do that, there is this very clever image here of a smart speaker. To understand the landscape, 50 percent of the UK have a smart speaker, 33 percent plan on buying one this year. 72 percent of those with smart speakers are using theirs daily. What are they doing? They're listening to the radio through audio on it and they're asking questions. Now this asking questions is really about a conversation you have with this meaningful device, smart speakers. And that is why we introduce actionable audio ads and actionable TV ads to the world. Let's look at audio. You have a 30-second industry spot. The difference with that audio ad is we put a call to action in it: Alexa, open Wickes. Now then us humans turn to our lovely smart speaker device and say Alexa, open Wickes. And you then have this beautiful curated conversation within it. And then we have this phenomenal rich attribution data that you can get from nowhere else. And I'll go on to that in this next slide. But let's think about the challenge that Wickes has: how do you engage with Gen Z? It's by talking their language, which is through voice. 68 to 24... actually 18 to 24 year olds have used a voice assistant in the last month. They're using it for music searching, utilities are the biggest frequency drivers of voice usage. And what's really important is that Gen Z usage of voice shows no sign of waning, it's growing. It is a meaningful way of communication. So let's look at what we can do for Wickes. And this is where you think of your wonderful audio ad, but we bring the live talking to Gen Z. How do you turn your house into a home? How do you actually save money? Meaningful sustainability key drivers that we're all looking for. If you want to know how, just say Alexa, open Wickes. And this is a lovely example of it because the time poor – I won't go into detail, I urge you guys to come and chat to me about that later – but ultimately you're in this wonderful experience where you say to them: would you like to be inspired? Would you like me to send you a link on how to save? And obviously you're going to say yes please, and you get the link popping straight up in your phone. It's a phenomenal experience. Now we can then go on to say you can set a reminder to have weekly inspiration videos and saving tips, and we can do this lovely content sheet. Now this attribution, I mean I don't know of anybody else – when we work certain media loves data, and this is something you could never get before, and it's mind-blowing what we get to see. Our voice through race: when you hear an ad and you say Alexa is on average 0.1 – if you think of display, the highest you get in display is 0.05, so this is huge. And the conversion rate within it is an average of 30 percent, range between 20 to 30 percent. So ultimately we can give you that. But what we have seen is we can tell you what time of day, day of week, that your media is performing, and we have seen in most cases it's not planned where the performance is. And then what we do is we work with all the publishers and we optimize to give maximum campaign update. That is it from me. I'm here for questions. Thank you very much.

Stay up here, Maria. We've got time for two quick questions from Gary and...

Cool, thank you. Thank you very much Maria. Just one question then. So if you want to be number one in Google search, you pay for it. How do you become number one for brand preference through voice?

It's a great question actually. Because if somebody wants to ask about – Alexa, tell me about the best place to buy – then it will actually look at a Wikipedia page and look at some information like that. To do that, it is actually by working with us. So if you want to send the link, you'll bring the link straight to the phone, so you're actually bypassing that search competitive cost because you've already engaged them through the conversation. And then the link comes to the phone. And we've seen through all of our research and brand research that if you have an ad that you talk to and talks back, your brand recall increased by 30 percent.

Perfect. All right, let's give it up for Maria. So from voice to video: how do we make video more engaging and even shoppable? Let's give it up for Sergey from Confer With.

Hi, how are we doing? Everyone hear me okay? Beautiful. Okay, what does a 40-something year old Australian know about inexperienced people with DIY and younger people? Well, what I want to do is rewind to a much younger version of Sergey back in his late 20s, early 30s, when he bought his first home. That's my beautiful wife and that's my place in Hagerstown that I bought. Now what's the first thing that you do when you buy a new home? DIY. This was my first project. I went on to YouTube, I learned how to replace the silicone on my bathroom. I got myself my first tool which was a butter knife. I got my second tool which I bought some hand-applied silicone and applied it to my bathroom on Saturday. And on Sunday, one weekend project two was replacing the carpet with floorboards in my bathroom. Now what you might notice here is a few dark marks right next to my bathroom in my hallway. When we lifted the carpets up from my hallway, we started to see a lot of mould and leakage of water into my kitchen, right into my kitchen which wasn't pretty. Then we lost the subfloor because of all the rotting and mould that went through there, and then eventually I lost my kitchen. So project 2.1 was replace the floorboards and replace the whole kitchen, which cost me around fifteen thousand pounds which I did not have the money. So how could that have been avoided? I'd like to introduce you to Wickes Live DIY Support Team. 'Hi, welcome to Wickes Live, how can I help? I'm trying to replace this silicone in my bathroom, I just need some supplies.' 'Okay, so I can see that you're looking at the right silicone product. Is it just around the bath or have you got tiles to the ceiling as well?' 'I'm doing the tiles on the ceiling.' 'Okay, so you'll probably need two of these. Great, yeah fantastic. Now do you also have this to apply the sealant?' 'Oh no, okay, yeah brilliant, you need one of those. Now this is a great little tool that a lot of people use when doing that job. A remover and smoother makes it easy to remove the old silicone and easy to add the new one.' 'Okay, I'm just gonna use a knife.' 'You definitely need one of these.' 'Okay, all right, fair enough. Okay.' 'Now do you also have some clean spirit?' 'What do I need that for?' 'If you don't clean the surfaces then basically it's going to leak.' 'Okay, yep, better get some of that. Absolutely. Services before you do the job. And one other tip, fill the bath up before you do this. Then when you apply the sealant and after it's dried, let the water out and it will compress everything, make a good seal for you.' 'Okay, brilliant, stop the legs yeah.' 'And then what a lot of people do when they're doing this job is they change their shower curtain. You've got new clean sealant, so why not have a nice clean...' 'Yeah actually I was going to do that, okay.' 'And then some shiny chrome as well, replacing the curtain rails, a really good idea.' 'Okay, is that hard to install?' 'No, you just screw this down.' 'Okay right, yeah let's do it.' 'And then just why not some lovely new shiny curtains and rings.' 'Great, thank you.' 'Okay.' There we go. So that's an example of what we could be doing with Confer With in the Wickes Live program. But I just want to very quickly go back to actually project one. I did that in one Saturday, or my mythical project one, and it was done in one Saturday. It cost me a little bit more but the average order value grew by 4.7 times. I had no damage. I actually saved myself 15,000 pounds which would have been a beautiful day for me. Happy customer. On average we see NPS scores of 80 on the Confer With platform. You're going to get a loyal customer because if I do a good job, I'm coming back to Wickes every day of the week. And generally the conversion rate on the Confer With platform averages 20 percent, so one in five people are going to be purchasing as a result of using Wickes Live. So who would use Confer With? Confer With connects online shoppers with retail experts. We give experience tools that delight customers and drive profitability. We work very heavily in the home sector. Thank you very much for your time. I think a little bit longer.

Right, Sergey, there wasn't there. Let's do one quick question from our... from Wickes.

That was really good. I love the way you pitched it as the project and not just the kind of shopping of a product, which is something really important to us at the moment. In terms of them pitching that project with some of the other retailers you're working with, how comfortable are people feeling like you're helpful and advising, or not just upselling to drive more value and volume?

I think the primary use of the Confer With platform is actually that advice. You've got human beings talking to each other, and the people that are selling on the platform, they stop selling very quickly and it's a human being talking to another person. In the example of the project I did there, you could imagine much larger scale projects as well. What people need is advice because you get a whole bunch of inexperience and those types of things. So that level of advice, I think, is very key. Naturally there's a way to improve the average order value, improve those types of things, but at the end of the day we know through the behaviors on the platform what increases satisfaction because we track all those behaviors, so we can coach to them.

Cool, thank you. Very cool. Thank you, Sergey. Great pitch. So we've looked at voice, we've looked at video, but what if you could use comedians to drive engagement? Our next startup does exactly that. From Comedy Crowd, please give it up for Peter.

Hello, can you hear me? Super. Hi, good afternoon. I'm Peter and I am both your problem and your solution. I'm your problem because I am the embodiment of a hopeless DIYer. Asking me to wallpaper my own living room is the equivalent of asking a potato to compose a symphony, it's just not gonna happen. But I'm also your solution because here as a representative of the Comedy Crowd, I can give you access to thousands of creators who can help you resonate and inspire that awesome audience. So the first question is why comedy? Well, comedy is memorable, comedy is engaging, but most importantly for this, comedy helps you speak to specific audiences. And that's a real facet here because you know who that audience is and you know what they lack and what they need. They lack inspiration and they need it. So what do we do as the Comedy Crowd? We are essentially a huge global community of 10,000 comedy creators. We crowdsource ideas from them. So we work with you on your creative brief, whether that be quite focused or quite broad. We put it out to them, we bring back ideas, and then we present those ideas to you and we produce them. So how would we work with Wickes? A quick review of the Wickes channel shows that yes, there probably is a need for a bit more visibility of the younger generation, but there's also some great stuff on there as well, particularly I thought the instructional videos are exactly what that generation needs. However, these people are far too competent, they're far too professional. As a hopeless DIYer, I need to see people who I can relate to. So we would work with you to try and understand exactly what you're trying to do. The brief as I say may be quite focused or it might be quite broad. The sort of things that we could do: we could look at those instructional vids and we could add in perhaps a hopeless DIYer who would help you to relate to them, bring them on a journey so that they can improve with the viewer. We could do music videos about DIY, we could do Taskmaster-style game shows, we could do short form socials, 10 seconds with the tagline 'When you should have done it yourself', we could do traditional ads. 'I just went to Wickes,' says the millennial to the Boomer who's asking how they did their DIY project. Or we could do branded scripted content. Imagine a sketch showing the Wickes boardroom debating this very problem. So we pull all those ideas, we take them back to you. You'll have examples of scripts, you'll have examples of performers and styles, what they've previously produced, and then you've got the option to pick a specific idea or perhaps as a menu you could choose certain aspects, a certain performer you like, or a certain premise that you like, and we can craft that for you. And then we make it, we produce it. We work with teams of indie producers or we can put those teams together from our community. So working with Comedy Crowd, you get access to a massive community of indie comedy creators who can really resonate with that audience. You get a menu of fantastic ideas which you can choose and customize for your needs. And you get a team ready to execute to hilarious effect. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Peter. I think as the last presentation suggested, I mean home improvement is quite a serious business. What I mean by that is when it goes wrong, it's quite painful financially, and actually if you're in a relationship you're quite likely to get divorced. So I was just curious as to how you hold that balance between sort of irreverence and humor and the fact that actually consumers want to be guided and handheld on a journey towards completing a project with confidence.

Absolutely, yeah. There's a right sort of comedy for every message. And it doesn't have to be a full-on slapstick stupid comedy; it can be subtle, it can be gentle. And that's why that idea perhaps of combining the professional instructional videos that you do with a comedic element that a Gen Z viewer can relate to might be a really good way to go. But we can certainly work on that with you.

Thank you, Peter. Very good. All right, thank you Peter. So the emerging generation of consumers engage in a lot of things, but social media is definitely one of them. And of course there's a huge opportunity for Wickes to have a strong presence. Our next company helps big brands go into social in a big way. From Gloop, please give it up for Liz.

Thank you. Hi there, I'm Liz and I'm Sales Director at Gloop. We are an AI mobile ad solution that allows you to engage with people based on what they do and how they feel. As you can see, there are six different products: Gloop Audio, Gloop Image, Gloop Video, Gloop Text, Gloop Place, Gloop Work. So the way I first got my head round Gloop was essentially if you can say it, if you can feel it, if you can go there, if you can watch it, if you can listen to it, we can target audiences based off of that. Sounds great, right? But how do we do it? Essentially, we target users based off their behavior across social platforms, an area where Gen Z spends a lot of time. For now, those platforms include Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. We qualify users in those environments, but we don't serve in those environments; we serve ads across mobile display and mobile video across mobile apps and sites. So that's your standard IAB formats and your pre-roll and in-line and also some rich media as well. We'll also be onboarding a number of different platforms at the end of this year, beginning of next, including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch. I can keep you posted with those though. So here's an idea of what one of those journeys would look like. Someone who is Gen Z – unfortunately Gen Z aren't really buying houses because we don't have enough money, so I say we, that's very complimentary – they don't have enough money, so they might be moving into a new flat and they're looking to do kind of a smaller DIY task such as painting their room. So they might tweet about it. We would then identify them by overlaying age and recognize that there is someone who is in market for paint, for example. We would then serve them a message for Wickes across a mobile site or a mobile app that they visit. Another example of that is someone who is pinning a board around upcycling, Gen Z are looking to become more sustainable, upcycling, buying furniture from charity shops and doing it up to make it look better for a new place they've decided to live. So if they've pinned or engaged with an upcycling board on Pinterest, we can then serve them an ad for Wickes. So here are a lot more ideas about what we could do, including five of our parts of our proposition. So as I said, Gloop Text – Gen Z chatting around the idea that they're looking to an upcycling project or looking to perform some DIY. We can target them based off just having positive sentiment towards that. If someone hates DIY, right, we don't want to target them because a Wickes ad is just going to really annoy them. So we want to only put our ad in front of people when they have the right feeling. Now the reason we say feelings and not sentiment is sentiment has been overused and it's under-explained. So there are 24 different feelings as opposed to your bog standard six that a lot of companies tend to offer. We also have Gloop Image. As I explained, that can be people sharing images of DIY they've already undertaken, maybe even images of boxes packed because they've moved house. So it doesn't need to be as on the nose as them with a paintbrush; it can be them doing something that indicates they might be in a frame of mind to take on some DIY. We also have Gloop Video. I certainly know that when I'm looking to do anything DIY-related, first of all it's terrifying, second of all I'm going to go to YouTube and have a little look about how exactly to do it. So if Gen Z is engaging with a video around how to paint a room, how to upcycle a piece of furniture, how to re-child something, we can then engage with them across the mobile apps or mobile sites. So they're then going to go on after looking at that YouTube video. We also have Gloop Audio. What that allows us to do is target people based off the audio content that they're engaging with. So that could be someone listening to a podcast, for example, about upcycling as mentioned. We will then target them with an ad for Wickes. And finally, we can target people who have visited Wickes stores or visited competitor stores. So really good for brand uplift but also incredibly good for competitor conquesting. So in short, Gloop allows you to harness AI that is completely proprietary to ours. We've been around for 10 years, so developing AI for 10 years that enables you to reach consumers and qualify them when they're positively expressing a feeling towards DIY, and then serve them a display or video ad across the sites or apps they then go on to visit. And what we're seeing is 2.5 times the industry benchmark CTR, which obviously is a great return on investment. We're seeing 85% video completion rate for six-second videos, and goes down to about 75.7% for your 15-second videos. And we're using advanced AI models which, let's face it, are the way things are going. Thank you very much.

Okay, well done Liz. Address Barry on brand there as well. Look, I'm matching it's fabulous.

That was really good, thank you. I need my headphones one second, I'm a bit deaf. Cheers. Thank you. On the targeting you use, you work with first party data as well – can brands give you first party data to make some of those ads more relevant? If you already know we've got a customer that we think is already on a decorating mission, where we can invest harder to target those customers?

So we wouldn't really ingest your first party data. The way we'd go about that would be you helping us with kind of keywords. The way you can look at the text product and the audio product is almost like contextual on steroids. So not only are we targeting based on keywords and key phrases, we're also overlaying 24 different feelings, and then we're also able to tell nuances in language. So that can be someone using a word that's spelled the same but means two different things, someone using sarcasm, someone using slang. Let's face it, people are sarcastic, especially in Britain on Twitter, so we need to be able to decipher that. So the way we would really use you would be by helping us perform the contextual keywords that we're putting together, help us know about who your audience is, and we can help you reach them. But in terms of ingesting something from CRM, not so much. However, if you're looking on the trade side and you had a list of maybe a hundred different trade companies you wanted to reach, we can use our product Gloop Work to engage with that list of 100 companies. So in that respect, yes, but probably not your consumer Gen Z audience.

Perfect, thank you. Cheers, thank you, perfect. Thanks Paul, thank you Liz. So Wickes employs 7,000 people, over 7,000 people in the UK. How can you use them to engage the next generation? How can you make sure you're attracting and retaining great talent? Our next company does exactly that. From Wiser, please give it up for Kudu and David.

Thank you very much. Hello, so you get two of us today. If you've heard of Wiser, we are an employer branding agency. So we're going to flip the script slightly because if you want to engage young DIYers, you need a young talent force to serve them who speak their language. So what we've done is we're going to show you how you can become more attractive to a young workforce. So I'm going to do that through a candidate touchpoint audit. Starting off by looking at your career site: how are you currently connecting with talent? You're doing a good job on your career site, you've got an early career section that's dedicated to young talent. You've got LinkedIn that shares content and employee wins, but it kind of lacks that human element. So how can you level this up? Looking at your career site, there's a big opportunity there for video testimonial content. Gen Z talent prefer learning from YouTube and videos rather than printed books or text, it's just a fact. Shine a light on success stories, use video testimonial content to do so. Where else? LinkedIn. You've already got an existing LinkedIn page but you're not taking full advantage of it. There is a massive opportunity to create a centralized brand hub where you put all your people-focused content and you can show your wins, your causes that you care about, and just different things going on within the organization. The reason this is so important is that Gen Z more than a lot of other generations before them care about the brand's sustainable behaviors, so it's really important to showcase that if you're looking to attract young talent. Where are the opportunities on your social media? You've got great existing brand channels, but you are missing a massive trick: there's no Life at Wickes social presence. So you need to create a Life at Wickes to give Gen Z an opportunity to get a window into your world. Now 54% of Gen Z say that they spend at least four hours per day on social media. If you're not marketing to them on social media, then what are you doing? So you need to create these channels to speak to that talent. Here are some best-in-class examples, some of the work we've done with Craft, Heinz, Knight Frank, and BBC: a strong visual identity, strong employee testimonial content, and just authenticity showing what it's actually like to work in the organization, what that organization cares for, and how the organization can support you. So that's how you can support in the digital world. But what about in person? To meet people in person, it's what we're here for and it's what is most engaging, and it doesn't make a difference whether you're Gen Z or whether you're a millennial, you want to have that in-person experience. So we have designed a Wiser Futures program which does exactly that. We essentially will train Wickes apprenticeship cohort to go back into schools across the UK and engage with Gen Z talent and tell them what the opportunities are at Wickes, what a day in their life is, and really give them that experience of talking to a peer rather than talking to someone who's a head of talent or a head of brand who's going to be speaking to them from a completely different perspective. The final thing I want to say is about ROI. The world of employer branding is a couple of steps behind the world of consumer branding, and testing ROI is something that we have tried to push the boundary on and innovate in the employer branding space. We've launched a tech platform called Wisdom which takes a biannual study of the UK working population and tests what their job priorities are, what they're looking for in a role, where they search for jobs online, but also specifically with Wickes content: what do they think of your employer brand? Would they work for you? Have they heard of you? And what do they think of the content you're currently putting out? By testing this with over 10,000 people on a six-monthly basis, we can actually track whether the content that you're putting out is working, how people think of your employer brand over time rather than at one specific point. Here's a quick sneak peek of our dashboard, but I know we're already out of time, so I'm going to leave you with some going-home presents. In order to improve your Gen Z appeal to your workforce: the first one is video testimonials – engaging with Gen Z talent has to be through video, it's more engaging and we know that people relate to it more. The second one is building your LinkedIn Life section – an easy win and something that will mean you have a people HQ, and 70% of all people looking for jobs are actually starting with LinkedIn. The last one is on social: Instagram. If anyone here has teenage children, you know how much they use Instagram, and if anyone has Instagram, you know that brands aren't just competing with other brands or employer brands, you're competing with Kim Kardashian, you're competing with that mate that you met seven years ago on a night out and is still on your feed. So you need your content to be thumb-stopping and making sure that your Instagram is strong for Gen Z talent. So important that in-person element – going on to campuses, going into schools with your apprenticeships – and finally measuring the ROI with Wisdom. Thank you very much.

All right, let's jump into a question. Thank you, Kudo. Thank you, David. I think it's interesting the way you spun the brief actually, quite neat. I think the question I was going to ask actually was around balance. I think history tells us, experience tells us, that our older more experienced colleagues out in the store base naturally have more experience and are often passionate DIYers. So there's therefore a trade-off between that voice of age and experience and what you're describing. And I apologize for the huge generalization, but a younger colleague will tend to be less experienced in DIY. How do you think we hold the tension between those two things?

It's a great point. I think you have so many areas of the business that could really benefit from a Gen Z perspective. So it's not necessarily all about the DIY, but it could be about how to reach candidates and how to reach consumers in the market. And with Gen Z talent, one of the things that we're seeing with a lot of our clients is a real focus on diversity, and we know that's something that Wickes is passionate about. And it's a really great way to build future leaders, diverse future leaders within your organization, starting them off at junior level with graduates or school leavers and bringing them through the company with really good management training which we know you offer. So focusing on your Gen Z talent is how you can build the business for the long term. And just to jump onto that, one of the things we love to say at Wiser is: if you're good enough, you're old enough. So yeah, trust Gen Z talent, train them up, give them the opportunities.

Love it. Brilliant. Thank you, guys. So we've seen five companies, but we have one more to go. We've talked a lot about social, but what about TikTok? Our next company does exactly that. From Favorite, please give it up for George.

Hey guys, how's it going everyone? It's good to meet you. Can you all hear me? Can you guys all hear me now? Yeah, okay great. So what's up guys? Let's jump right into it. I'm really sorry about this, but your TikTok account sucks. It's as if it was run by a 40-year-old guy you found on Fiverr. I'm really sorry to say that, but that's just what it is. So why, where did it all go wrong? Where did it go wrong, guys? Because you have so much potential. So there's no thumbnails to make the videos worth watching, there's hardly any use of trending sounds, your hashtags are a disaster, they're not trending hashtags, I don't think they work at all. The videos aren't really that engaging either, and you're missing tools to execute great content. I know she's having a great time with this one. Um, so yeah, there's no visual hooks, too much text, it's not working out. And I think you guys are appealing to the right audience. Okay, now I'm gonna be done bashing you guys with that. But what can we do? Why does this matter? So you can try all the fancy tools in the world, but you need to listen to where these people spend most of their time. Gen Z spends most of their time on TikTok. In the UK alone, 30 million people are using TikTok daily. The average user spends about 90 minutes a day on the platform. I guarantee – I mean, I spend like three hours, I'm not social, I mean, I don't want to out myself but I will. So Gen Z has now started TikToking something rather than Googling something as a means of information discovery. So rather than going on Google and typing how to do something, they'll find a visual on TikTok, right? Which is why I think you guys can really leverage TikTok to do that. But oh, who's that guy? Who's that guy right there? That guy over there. That's me. So I'm GG, I'm 22. I've been making TikTok plans for the last three years. Being a part of Gen Z is literally my full-time job. Favorite, this is us right here. I created some brands and I'll let you know, I get paid to make TikToks, it's pretty fun. I can't complain, it's a fun lifestyle. We've done over 100 million views organically and we've done over a million conversions leveraging TikTok Shop and all kinds of other things. So as a TikTok-first agency and as we are a performance marketing agency, our job is to start with a broad net, test as much as possible, and then refine those creatives based on the data we get. We're very data-driven. We're not going to reinvent the wheel, there's no point in doing that. Let's look at what's working and let's make it better. So changing the visual hooks, zero in on the perfect creative to drive performance at a lower cost, and being reactive to trends. You want to implement all the trends that are out there right now: trending songs, trending music, let's just take it and make it work for us and post it. So by leveraging trends and viral aspects of current events, we can appeal to any average consumer on TikTok because they're going to be aware of what the trend is, they're not going to skip it. You see an ad, they're probably going to skip. I skip all ads on TikTok if it isn't native to the platform. So anything native we want to implement, it works. The game plan, okay, this is the big part guys, get excited. So working with Favorite, you get access to a pool of 10,000 plus content creators, that's not a joke. We have a thing we use, but if you want to find out, you can come find out more information later on. The best part is we set the rates right, so we can easily meet your budget. So when it comes to scaling content creators, we will set those rates. Sometimes they're really overexpensive for no reason. They come to us, we have those rates, they work for us, it works both ways. So we will create the content that actually works for you, whether it be DIY lives of like a DIY guy, paint with me, a mini-series, and tap into DIY Talk, which is something I saw in your TikTok account. I don't really see any DIY Talk, but if you take a look here, the niche itself has over 800 million views. And Wickes, let's jump into this, let's make it work. So yeah, we learn from the content and we create and optimize over time. If that works, so please don't leave me on read. Come talk to us, and I'll even give you guys free gin. We have like an unlimited supply. But guys, that's all from me. Thank you so much. And I'm so sorry about the intro slide. I didn't mean it.

GG, love that. Putting your body on the line for a pitch. Great joke. Questions?

Hey George, thanks for that. That was really interesting. I think to your point, is there anyone that you've seen on TikTok or any brands that you're working with that are facing into the challenge we've got in terms of accessing a much younger-focused social media channel that are doing this really, really well?

Yeah, so obviously about leveraging content creators. We have them, like even if they're just doing their own thing in the day, we'll reach out with those guys, we'll work with those guys, and we'll send that product. We have a couple of tech tool companies like Amtec for example. So we'll send out for those guys and they make content on our behalf. We've got a brief and stuff as to the videos they should be making. That answers your question.

Perfect. All right, thank you, Gigi. Great. No rise. Hey there, you guys, it's gin there for you. And the gin for you. All right, all legit. Paul and Gary up here in just a minute to talk through the winners. But while we give them a minute to deliberate, let me remind you of a couple of key things. First of all, if you would like to have your own sort of session like this on stage, you can do that right here at the House of Innovation. We've got 34 companies, head over there, let them know what your challenge is, and we'll curate five or six companies for you to meet in half an hour. It's all part of our speed dating sessions. You can just go over there, talk to the people in the lab coats, or sign up using the QR code. If you enjoyed this format, we also create a podcast which is called There's a Startup for That. There's some great brands on there that are putting up their briefs and then we bring in startups that solve that. So do check that out as well. And then lastly, if you enjoyed this session, we're going to be back here tomorrow. This is number five of six of these brand challenges that we're doing across Mad Fest, and tomorrow we've got Taco Bell right here on the Brand Innovation Stage as well. So, how are we going, Gary and Paul? Almost ready? They're trying to work out how to give away 20K right now. Go on, Jake? Mark? No, okay, all right. Mark saves. Come up, come on. Yeah, all right.

So that's what I'm keen to do before we announce the winner: talk through each of the six companies that you've just met. So we started our journey with Say It Now and their big idea for how brands can engage around smart speakers and voice. What were your thoughts on Say It Now?

And then after that we looked at video and how we can do the link into store with Confer With. What were your thoughts on Confer With?

Cool. And then we looked at the world of comedy and how you could perhaps use comedy to drive engagement. What were your thoughts on Comedy Crowd?

Yeah, cool. And then we looked at Gloop and their big idea for social. What were your thoughts on Gloop?

And then we looked at... we changed tack and looked at employee engagement. Yeah.

And then we finished with Favorite and their big idea for TikTok.

Brilliant. But of course, you could be working with all six of these companies, and we'll make sure we do introductions after. But we can only have one winner for the purpose of today. So the winner of the 20K paid pilot and the brand challenge is – it was very close between two startups – but the winner was Maria and Say It Now.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you Paul, thank you Gary. Congratulations Maria. Like I said, it's been a blast. We'll see you back here tomorrow when we're talking to Taco Bell. But right now, it's time to hand back to Mark.