TOI announces winners of The SkunkWorks Challenge

Team MSL Group won the first prize, while Good Bad Weird and Ethinos came second and third, respectively.

The Times of India and afaqs! have announced the winners of the first SkunkWorks Challenge, a unique competition for digital professionals and experts. For this, afaqs! had partnered with The Times of India, the brand that provided the first digital challenge to the participants. Through this exercise, the brand team is keen on finding digital solutions for its 'I Lead India' programme.

After receiving a total of 124 entries, TOI shortlisted the final participants into 10 teams. Each team had a maximum of two participants. The teams were given a brief of getting 1 lakh+ people to sign up for organ donation through a digital campaign for its 'I Lead India' campaign.

Team MSL Group won the first prize, while Good Bad Weird and Ethinos came second and third, respectively.

The idea was to create a digital/social campaign for Organ Donation Day, which results in more than one lakh sign-ups and makes it the talk of the town/buzz word for the week. The caveats were that the ideas had to be executable within seven days and the campaign should be simple to be easily understood by the common man

"The campaign should be engaging, create awareness, generate conversations and word of mouth, resulting in sign-ups. There should be daily interactions (throughout the week) on Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, the campaign should go viral, create a lot of buzz and encourage people to share and ask other people in their network to sign up," noted the brief from Times of India.

The teams were locked away for 24 hours at a venue provided by the organisers of this challenge on July 15, during which they ideated and brainstormed for digital solutions to the given brief.

Speaking about the outcome of the overall event, Rahul Kansal, executive president, The Times of India, says, "The Skunkworks Challenge presented some great ideas and brilliant work. We were rather impressed to see such good work in just 24 hours. We look forward to working with the winners and create an impactful digital campaign."

Speaking about their experience of the Skunkworks Challenge, Tushar Bajaj of MSL Group says, "The concept of the event was very good though we felt that 15 minutes as a presentation time was a little less. Otherwise it gave us a fantastic opportunity to show our talent and expertise."

Vishal Sagar of Good Bad Weird comments, "It was a great learning opportunity for us and we learned from the works of the other 10 participants. It is a great idea and provides us a platform to prove our mettle. It also helps a young company like ours in its growth path."

Nishant Warrier of Ethinos states, "The concept helped us to come up with something out-of-the-box, which wouldn't have been possible from office. TOI had an extensive brief and it was a brilliant campaign to work on. Besides, the feedback from the judges was also good and will help us gain more edge in our work."

'The SkunkWorks Challenge' now promises to be back with a new challenge soon. afaqs! also plans to expand this challenge beyond digital and take it to other media as well.