From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Ignite your Marketing Team’s Innovation Potential with an AI Hack-a-thon

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of AI tools that are being launched daily. Today, Marketers have over 2,000 options to choose from (see Futurepedia.io for the most current list). So how do you assess, for example, the 200+ copywriting tools or the 200+ design assistants to identify the one that’s best for you? And how do you motivate your team to lean into this avalanche, rather than freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights?

I suggest you organize a ‘Marketing AI Hack-a-thon’, which is a great way to engage your entire marketing team (and the rest of the organization) with AI tools while at the same time encouraging cross-functional collaboration and supporting professional development. Best of all, at the end you will have identified the tools your team needs to become more efficient and more effective.

Here’s a quick 5-step guide to organizing your own Marketing AI Hack-a-thon to get your team excited about exploring and using AI tools:

1. Decide on a Marketing Challenge to Solve

Just about any area in Marketing can benefit from the assistance of an AI tool, but I suggest you choose an area that involves repeated processes that could be automated or expedited. Some examples include:

· Blog content creation

· Video creation

· Website page design

· Social Media content creation

· Personalization of emails and landing pages

The brief to the participants should be to explore and test a variety of AI tools that might address that challenge, and then select and present (with a demo) the tool they feel is best suited for the task.

2. Engage the Entire Organization

• Invite members from many different teams — not just from Marketing. Most other departments envy Marketing teams for getting paid to be innovative and creative, so participating in a Marketing Hack-a-thon gives them a chance to participate in the ‘fun’.
• Also, cross-functional participation makes buy-in easier across the organization: the Finance team might be more willing to approve the purchase of a new tool if a Finance member was part of the selection process and can attest to the efficiency improvement that such a tool can provide.
• You may want to ask other department heads to ‘nominate’ a few high-potential team members for this exercise so that participation becomes a badge of honor and makes recruiting participants easier the next time around.
• To get further buy-in to invest in AI tools, make sure that the judges who will evaluate the presentations are from the senior ranks of the organization — it’ll raise the stature of this exercise and increase participation.
• Have participants register via a Google form, and ask them how comfortable they are with AI tools (on a scale from 1–10) and which tools they’ve already used. This will come in handy when you ask the same question in a post-hack-a-thon survey, as you’ll most likely demonstrate that everyone’s level of comfort with AI tools has increased dramatically).

3. Make Participation Worthwhile

Winning teams should get a prize — whether that’s a $100 Amazon gift card for each team member, an extra day off, or other perks common in your organization. But more importantly, you should stress the benefits of participating in such a hack-a-thon besides finding ways to make Marketing more effective and/or efficient. Here’s what’s in it for the participants:

• It allows them to network with other team members who they normally may not interact with
• It lets them showcase their creativity and get exposure to senior execs
• It provides an opportunity to learn about a fast-moving and ‘hot’ topic

4. Assign Teams, SMEs, and a Deadline

• Teams should consist of 4–8 people and ideally include members from different teams/departments.
• To answer questions about the contest, the challenge, or the tools, assign a subject matter expert who should make themselves available for questions for the duration of the hack-a-thon (have them set up ‘office hours’ a few times so that participants know where/when to reach them).
• As for timing, you can either choose to condense the work into one day or spread it out over multiple days. If you are a fully remote organization, it may make more sense to break the event into three parts:

1. Kick-off call to explain the challenge and the structure of the hack-a-thon

2. 10 working days to give teams the time to a) organize themselves, b) do the research, c) test out various tools, d) select a recommendation, and e) craft a short (5-minute) presentation to the judges. Tell the participants that they should spend no more than 8 hours on this project during that time (make that also clear to the other department heads, so they know that this will not completely take over their employee’s time during this hack-a-thon).

3. Presentation to judges (suggestion: for each team, allocate 5 min for the presentation and 2 min for the judges to deliberate, and add time for introductions and announcement of winners).

5. Provide a presentation outline and judging criteria

Here’s a suggested outline for a 5-min presentation that each team can follow:

1. Problem statement (what are you trying to solve for?)

2. Tools explored (what AI tools did you research?)

3. Evaluation criteria (how did you evaluate these tools and narrow your selection?)

4. Choice (which tool would you recommend we use?)

5. Use case (show us how you used the tool and what it accomplished) — this should take up the majority of the presentation

6. Benefits (describe/quantify the benefits if we were to use this tool at scale)

The judging criteria can be fairly simple — this is not a scientific exercise but an effort to get people excited about AI tools. I suggest keeping it to these 4 criteria:

1. How well does the solution presented solve the challenge?

2. How big is the impact on Marketing’s effectiveness/efficiency?

3. How well was AI used to address the challenge?

4. How well was the solution presented (wow factor of the presentation)?

I suggest you set up a shared Google Sheet where each judge can enter their scores for each criterion (1=poor, 5= excellent), with a separate tab to tally automatically the scores, so that the winner is identified as soon as the last team has been evaluated.

That’s it. And while it sounds easy, expect to devote quite a bit of time to organizing it. But you’ll find it a worthwhile exercise. Feedback to my hack-a-thon was very positive: participants enjoyed the cross-team collaboration and felt that they learned a lot about an emerging field that they wish they had more time for, while the executives were excited to see the organization embrace new technologies.

If you’ve found other ways to help organizations embrace and adopt AI tools, please add them in the comment section, I’d love to hear from you!