Publishers show its not just marketers that get collaboration at the AOP and Mozilla Hack Day.

Seb is Marketing Week’s agency specialist.

Last week’s AOP and Mozilla Hack Day event brought together journalists, web developers and graphic designers, to demonstrate how publishers can take advantage of HTML 5 to boost online engagement. Pitch attended the 2-day event to see how UK media owners can benefit from a collaborative approach.

Collaboration is the best way to deliver constant innovation. It’s no coincidence that innovative thinking doesn’t often come from traditional organisation models.

This week’s AOP & Mozilla Hack Day was a chance for AOP members including,the BBC, IPC Media and NewsQuest to collaborate on projects using one of interactive marketing’s most dynamic mediums, HTML 5.

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Speaking to Pitch, Phillip Smith, news innovation specialist at Mozilla, said that HTML 5 was a perfect topic to kick-start the collaborative process around digital creative for publishers.

“We’ve seen the fantastic results already this year from publishers collaborating with each other on the editorial side and feel that Hack Day events can help challenges overcome the challenges of online through collaborative thinking,” he says.

“HTML 5 is a great platform for media owners to power their apps and have greater control over content, which is why we’re encouraging new solutions around it.”

Attendees split into seven teams and worked over the course of Thursday and Friday mornings to develop a HTML 5 solution that could work on all platforms, including iOS and Android. The event then transferred to today’s AOP Digital Publishing Summit at Westminster Bridge Park Plaza, where the projects were judged and prizes awarded to the winning teams.

Projects were a combination of apps and websites that were pitched as solutions to real problems currently affecting AOP members’ businesses. They included a dynamic picture gallery and an events listing app.

Elsewhere, Aviva, O2 and Heineken announced that their marketing teams were sharing expertise, skills, and insights with one another to help develop “marketers of the future.”

According to Michelle Keaney, head of marketing capability at Heineken UK, each brand’s “real openness to sharing” should offer them all an advantage over rivals in their respective sectors.

Adland has a tendency to protect its ideas, which ultimately thwarts any potential. It’s true that innovative ideas aren’t created by committee, but great ideas can become even greater when exposed to different insight, challenges and solutions.

Brands want their agencies to be collaborative and work seamlessly together. While this won’t be easy and sounds counter-intuitive, there are ad shops out there already doing this.

Interestingly, account management will be key in projects with agencies collaborating, not creative. You can collaborate all day long but if you don’t have expertise in very specific areas then you are lost.

With online ad spend rising, according to this week’s Bellwether Report,agencies need to start collaborating more, similarly to what the AOP is trying to encourage with its Hack Day events, if they are too to consistently deliver exciting innovations in interactive advertising.

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