Colly

Example result of a co-marketing campaign creating more interesting ads for the consumer, even when the companies are seemingly competitors.
Real-world example of co-marketing
Another real-world example, but not from the digital world

Inspiration

Co-marketing can bring several benefits for companies, but this possibility is greatly underused. Advertising together can help reach new audiences, lower cost per customer and result in more interesting ads for the customers. Especially for smaller companies, finding good partners can be challenging, but also dealing with the practicalities of designing the campaign, sharing the expenses and responsibilities and so on are not trivial questions. A pre-structured framework for co-marketing can help companies regardless of their size. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/MRR-11-2016-0270 https://www.shopify.com/blog/195109129-co-marketing-strategic-partnerships

What it does

Our demo helps you to get an idea of how the interface and functions could work. You are given a role as a marketing officer of a company, more details can be found on the landing page. In real world, you would of course represent your own company and give the information for the system when registering or creating a new campaign.

You can help the platform learn what kind of characteristics fit well together by clicking whether you see any room for co-operation with randomly picked companies on the "Glimpse" page.

On "Suggestions" page you see a list of companies together with their estimated match with your company. From that page, you could also initialize a co-marketing campaign.

On customizing page, you could make you first proposition for the campaign.

How we built it

The front-end is built with self-hosted WordPress, which inherently means using PHP as well. It connects to a Python/Flask API service that runs on the same machine. The API service has a machine learning model built with Tensorflow, which unfortunately is not connected in the demo but the data is mocked.

Challenges we ran into

We were not familiar with how to use PHP or any advanced functions of WordPress, for which reason majority of the time was used on solving trivial problems with it. All in all, we used technologies that were new to us (Tensorflow, Flask as well), which slowed down the development a lot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that the concept is very solid and has real benefit for companies. We also built a prototype that give a good idea of how the platform would work and we have the skeleton of the architecture to continue building on.

What we learned

To select technologies to use more carefully. BUT, also how WordPress works, what Flask is good for and the basics of Tensorflow and that co-marketing is a real thing that is not used as much as it should be.