Introducing the Precis Hackathon 2022

March 7th to 11th marked the date for Precis’ first-ever hackathon event. Designed and brought to life by Technical Manager, Viktoriia Prykhodko, this week in the Stockholm office was a hub of innovation – and more crowded than we’ve seen it in a long time!

Have a read through if you’d like to find out more about what the teams got up to (and perhaps get an insight into some future features of Precis tech and services).

What was the Precis hackathon?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a hackathon is: a hackathon is a creative problem-solving event within a limited timeframe. Often, it is associated with intense periods of working and product development outside of the normal day-to-day work of a team. And when you think of a hackathon, tech teams or groups of developers usually come to mind. However, the Precis hackathon was a little different in its scope.

In fact, attendees had the chance to come up with their own project ideas – as long as it helped Precis, the industry or our clients. So at the start of the week, we had a range of proposals that covered everything from investment strategies in sustainable start-ups, competitor pricing benchmarks, to effectively serving ads to reduce data transfer – i.e. sustainable advertising. Each team competed in the hackathon with the chance of winning a 30,000SEK cheque (and a big trophy).

Included in our hackathon were 41 attendees from across 7 of our offices, who came together in 6 teams to work on these ideas in an intense 40 hour week.

But what were the ideas and who was the ultimate winner?

Read on to find out…

What were the Precis hackathon pitches?

The Price Index Grinder (The PIG)

Named after the Precis symbol for Aarhus, ‘The PIG’ is a prototype for a comprehensive dashboard on commodity pricing.

The background to this project comes with the greater agency that consumers have in their purchasing habits. Indeed, with one search on Google, consumers can identify where they can buy their desired item at the lowest price, making pricing one of the most important competitive tools for retailers.

With ‘The PIG’ at their disposal, an e-commerce client can use custom labels to filter products in shopping, compare prices in Google shopping to their competitors and make adjustments in their campaigns based on these insights. And in an industry so dependent on margins – this could be just the edge they need to get ahead.

“This would be great as a client to keep track of your prices during seasonal sales to ensure sales volumes and not lose the price race against competitors!” – Precis strategist.

The automated access system

How much time does your company spend on managing access to internal resources? Do you have an automated system for this? Do you use an outside tool? If so, does it cover everything you need?

The automated access team set out to build an internal system for maintaining the access that staff and clients have to our resources. Doesn’t sound sexy to you? How about the fact that when asked, our Team Leads spend on average 2-3 hours per month on managing accesses across different internal and external accounts.

The tool that this team designed would allow for specialists to be automatically added or removed from a client account with the touch of a button, and in the future, automate access for our specialists when they begin or end work with a certain client.

Startup camp

Startup camp definitely turned the expectation of a hackathon project on its head with their proposal. Within their team, they set out to define a scalable solution for how Precis could provide digital marketing services to sustainable startups in return for equity.

The project had background with earlier work at Precis, with success for second-hand clothing app, Plick. In exchange for equity, Precis supported Plick to achieve a 350% increase in user growth and establish an automated marketing machine that led to huge success and a recent acquisition by Schibsted.

The aim of the startup camp was to create a replicable model for this investment, by producing a maturity assessment that could identify opportunities for Precis and mutually beneficial arrangements for startups. The companies would be judged on the criteria of marketing maturity, financial viability and sustainable impact, and then within Precis, we would have a marketing service set up specially to work with these companies.

SuDiMA – sustainable digital marketing

The internet accounts for 2% of global CO2 emission and 30% of this comes from data transfer. 

A huge amount of this comes from advertising – particularly as the industry moves more towards video formats across display, social and streaming platforms. 

SuDiMA asked the question, how can Precis help do its part in reducing the carbon footprint of digital marketing? 

Well, they set out to reduce the amount of data that is transferred when a page loads. By creating an ad generation tool that changed the script in ads so that they only load when a user sees the ad frame on screen, instead of automatically upon page load. 

The outcome was hugely successful. Using a test campaign, they calculated that by using this new format, we could decrease data transfer by 38% across all Precis clients. Saving 13,000 tonnes CO2 for 3 months. In normal person speak, this amount of CO2 equates to driving 108 million kilometres in a diesel car or power and heat for 30 houses over 31 years. 

Connectors

All of us who have worked in digital marketing have experienced the pain of getting live reporting through Google Data Studio or another similar service. Whether it’s through a SaaS solution, or through connectors via Supermetrics, there are often times when the integrations between platforms fail – or the data is out of date or unreliable.

The connectors team set out to expand upon Precis’ existing library of APIs from ad platforms to our default reporting platform, Google Data Studio. Over the course of the week, the team set up connections to Snapchat, TikTok and LinkedIn that now allows specialists to connect directly to client data and cut out the middle-man, neat stuff!

The lone wolves – a.k.a The Precis vault

Wanting to understand how you measure up against others is something all of us struggle with in our lives – and marketers are no different. How can I understand if my CPC is ‘good’? How does my CPM measure against others in my industry? These are questions we hear often at Precis, and there isn’t always an easy answer. Existing tools on the market aren’t comprehensive enough and don’t offer clear enough segmentation to really understand where you should sit in relation to others in the benchmark.

But this is something the lone wolves set out to solve. The Precis vault is a benchmarking dashboard that compares all data across search, shopping and video channels (soon to be more) to determine where your marketing performance sits compared to others in your industry.

“Rapid, flexible, and powerful. This dashboard conveniently addresses one of the most prominent topics raised by clients: industry peer performance” – Precis digital specialist. 

The winning team

After the teams presented their prototypes on the Friday afternoon, the judges sat down to deliberate on one of the most difficult decisions of their lives (no exaggeration). After much back and forth, the SuDiMA team were decided as the ultimate winners of Precis Hackathon 2022.

Thanks to the extensiveness of their pitch, the innovativeness, and the quickly applicable tool as well as the supporting data to back up the impact of their design – they came out as the stand out winners.

But it’s fair to say that all the prototypes were extremely impressive and in some form or another, will all play a part in Precis’ future….so stay tuned. 

If you would like to learn more about how we work with learning and innovation at Precis, follow us on social or, you could simply apply for a job and join us next year…