News Corp is taking its innovation event News Foundry to agencies as a way to create value for agencies and their clients, as well as creating ideas that interest the publishers audience and can effect its bottom dollar.
Mark Drasutis, head of innovation for News Corp Australia, told AdNews that the publisher is currently having conversations with agencies about hosting its hackathon style events in-house.
“I've been down in Melbourne speaking to Aegis, I've been speaking to GroupM, I've been speaking to agencies about how they can use our offering to connect with a clients needs,” Drasutis said.
Drasutis said he's hopeful News will conduct four-to-five of the events across Australia, with Drasutis telling AdNews that while the publisher will own the IP of all the ideas created, there is no set way the ideas have to be created and then produced.
“We'll work with them [agencies] in where they land those ideas, but working with them on ideas that satisfies their client's ideas and our customer needs is much more powerful than going to them with something that anyone can do, that's a much more powerful execution,” he said.
News Corp held its latest hackathon event last Friday, which saw staff from REA, NewsLifeMedia and News Corp work for three days straight to solve a business problem and come up with a commercially viable business product using the vast amounts of data available in the News Corp stable.
Drasutis explained that more than 600 News Corp staff have been through the event and there is now plans in the works to roll out the events globally.
“It's happening in News Corp globally,” he said. “We had a conversation today about how do we extend these to a global platform and that starts to mean we're at a different level, and one having different conversations because it becomes a much more powerful example about how we can get away from our day job.”
“It's just indicative of News Corp Australia becoming an innovative business in Australia,” he said.
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