Mindshare's Virtual Hackathon

Mindshare’s advanced analytics team organized their first virtual hackathon for college students last month, challenging them to create a media plan for two hypothetical perfume brands in 24 hours. The assignment included data analysis, modeling, media strategy and more.

For several years Mindshare has hosted a case study competition for talented students with backgrounds in Marketing Analytics or Data Science. This event gives students the opportunity to gain experience solving real world business problems in the media world. They also get exposure to Mindshare leadership and can be invited to interview with the agency; in fact, a number of our employees have actually gotten their start at Mindshare or GroupM this way, including Mindshare’s Ikechi Okoronkwo, Head of Business Intelligence and Analytics, who was honored as one of Adweek’s Media All Stars in 2020.

In 2020, due to the pandemic, we had to cancel this live event, but we didn’t want current students, who are already going through a lot of other educational challenges, to miss this opportunity. So we turned it into a Mindshare Virtual Hackathon, an online event with the same benefits as the case study competition, but with a slightly different format. It was a 24-hour event with the assignment provided to students in the morning of the first day and the delivery and presentations taking place on the next day.

We had 60 students participating from five universities: Pace, Baruch, Fordham, Columbia, and the University of Rochester. They worked together in teams, spending the whole day and night going through the data, coming up with creative solutions, and creating and rehearsing their presentations.

And they did a great job! The jury—Shane McAndrew (our Chief Data Strategy Officer), Ikechi Okoronkwo, Trevor Sponseller, Fabio Giraldo, and Anthony Miyake (GroupM)—was very impressed by the quality of their work, creativity, and team cooperation. The winning team (from Simon Business School at the University of Rochester) will be interviewed for new job openings on our advanced analytics team, and we saw a lot of great other potential candidates as well.