It's 7 PM in Bengaluru, and the energy is as high as when the day started. We are in day two of our dentsu x MiQ ignition 2026 hackathon event held at MiQ's Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.
The event concept was to bring together teams from dentsu's agencies, selected global clients, and MiQ global team and embed them physically alongside MiQ's engineers and data scientists. The format was modelled on rapid prototyping culture, but instead of building speculative products, the seven teams worked on real, live client briefs. Each team had two days to prototype a data-driven solution to a real business problem. Beyond the energy and innovative ideas that such a format brings, it was an opportunity to break down silos and see what happens when teams work towards a common goal and share accountability for the outcome.
So, what happens when those teams meet and build their custom algorithm? Magic happens! A dentsu strategist, a client and an MiQ data scientist hunched over a laptop trying to figure out whether this brand feels cool to Gen Z; finding the response in movement patterns, browsing signals, data footprint. The question somewhere underneath the brief is whether you can find coolness in a dataset and, more importantly, can you teach the algorithm what coolness is.
It’s day 2 in Bengaluru and the team has not figured it out yet – but they are getting closer. Beyond the outcome, the spirit of dentsu x MiQ Ignition 2026 is present through every team.
Does rapid prototyping really matter?
Life in a global innovation role now mostly happens across email chains, Teams calls and slide decks. A typical journey goes like this: a brief goes one way, an output comes back the other, and things often get lost in translation.
Ignition 2026 is built on the premise that rapid prototyping matters more now than ever. We had the luxury to solve more in two days that many teams will in months because we had the right people in the rooms sharing the physical spaces, accountability and, most importantly, the outcomes.
Here’s how the dynamic shifts when this happens. The strategist is on hand to bring the story to life, the client is involved and can sign off on the proposed model, and the data scientist can be confident that the output will be commercially sound. It's also, frankly, more honest and authentic; you find out quickly what the data can and can't do when the person asking the questions is sitting next to the person running the queries.
Events like Ignition 2026 illustrate how each party becomes part of the conversation, dissecting the algorithms and understanding how to use them to their advantage. We’ve learned that 48 hours is long enough to produce something you can test and that agility is an important skill to have. Every prototype can become a new input, a better signal, a smarter feed into the global ecosystems that are making decisions at scale.
What did the teams build?
We had seven briefs in just 48 hours with challenges coming from different verticals and different viewpoints, still they all had common questions. What is hindering growth? Can we build something that will offer a solution?
Teams were diverse in people and skills but also in the challenges they were solving, from one team working on operationalizing cultural relevance, to another building a Value Index to dynamically upweight investment towards the locations and product combination most likely to convert. A Merchant Suitability Score was built, but so was a direct line between media spend and Net Sales Value. The remaining briefs pushed into territories that are harder to systematize like understanding audiences at a level so granular that it makes relevance achievable across 100% of media buys, or mapping the mechanisms through which attention delivers business value. Those were the prototypes we built in 48 hours.
The point of the sprint was to get the teams far enough to release their solutions in a live brief, and pilot something never built before on their next campaign.
By Thursday afternoon, every team presented to a panel made up of MiQ COE and dentsu and MiQ global teams. The team that won showed the strength of their idea, discussed why it was never done before and how the innovation will drive immediate business impact. While I can’t say who won, I can say they had a secret sauce that brought everything to life.
The broader point
My personal experience is that, too often, innovation is the thing that gets scheduled, deprioritized, rescheduled, and eventually absorbed into someone's existing workload. The point of Ignition 2026 was to remove that option. Teams had no choice but to work together to deliver a working prototype.
Time and Attention have become status symbols in our industry, but when I see what can be achieved in two days by a mixed team of people who think differently and build differently who are using a live brief, I am curious to see what could happen when we step away from PowerPoint and Teams to work and build together. Maybe this is what happens when you’re trying to move an organization forward rather than just document the intention to do so.
Maybe this is the future of the agency model – one built on learning fast and breaking things.
