The French Riviera has long served as a place where advertising people go to be seen, but this year at least one agency is more interested in watching.
PMG, the independent digital agency based in Fort Worth, is staging what it calls a hackathon during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, an event that functions less as a competition than as a global casting call. The agency is looking for people who can build things with artificial intelligence — specifically, things that might unclog the kinds of persistent operational problems that have bedeviled media agencies since long before anyone called them "media agencies."
The format is not new; technology companies have been running hackathons for years, often as a way to identify engineers worth hiring without subjecting them to the usual interview rituals. What is perhaps notable is that an agency is now borrowing the model, suggesting that the talent it needs most urgently is no longer the kind that presents well in a conference room.
(Whether the winners will be asked to relocate to Fort Worth was not immediately clear.)
The hackathon reflects a broader anxiety across the agency world about where, exactly, the people who understand both marketing and machine learning are supposed to come from. The large holding companies have been making acquisitions and announcing internal academies; the independents have been trying to look nimble. Everyone agrees that something must be done, which is often the stage just before someone overpays for a consultancy.
PMG, for its part, appears to be betting that the talent is out there, somewhere, and that the best way to find it is to set a problem and see who shows up with a working solution.
It is, in its way, a very old idea dressed in new vocabulary: find the people who can actually do the work.
Original story published in adage.com: "PMG’s AI hackathon at Cannes and agencies’ search for talent - Ad Age"