Mar 6, 2018
The Big Little Banner — A Brand New Social Innovation
by Ieva Tilindytė, ChangeMakers’ON
The previous weekend was a real challenge for innovators — the 11th hackathon of the annual Hacker Games series was a total blast of ideas and brand new projects. This event took place in KTU Santaka Valley and hosted 218 software developers, engineers, designers and even more. Today we are talking to Vytautas Butkus, a team-member of ARTB project, which took the first place in Software Track category and won 800 eur prize from TeleSoftas and Teasonet, as well as tickets to the ChangeMakers‘ON boost camp for the best social innovation!
What are your emotions after “Hacker Games”?
Lately, I had some sleepless nights so the strongest emotion after a hackathon is tiredness. On the other hand, when you win something, you feel like walking on air. I am happy that our project was successfully recognized but there is also a sense of responsibility to work on further development of it.
Was it the first time for you to participate in such hackathon?
No, it wasn’t the first time for me. Actually, I’ve organized a few of them before and the last hackathon in which I took a part was about generating ideas on how to interest Tesla to build Gigafactory in Lithuania. My team and I came up with an idea to build this Gigafactory in the Minecraft environment. After that, we successfully developed this project, so there was already some experience of how to participate in such events and achieve the maximum result in a short time.
Was it hard for you to bring together the team?
I was quite sure to be the only one person to develop my idea because I was thinking that other participants would either not understand my ideas or they would appear to them just to be uninteresting or inappropriate for a hackathon, as it was an idea of an artistic project.
The idea was born 3–4 years ago when I worked for Adform with online advertising products. To some extent, the idea came from frustration that people do not like the banner ads on web pages and 99% of the banners shown do not receive a click. At the same time, ad blocking programs grew at incredible speeds. This confrontational environment creates a lot of possibilities to ask inconvenient questions, to make people think.
Could you tell us more about Big Little Banner?
It is one of the three art projects that have been made during the hackathon. Big Little Banner is a small banner with a big dream — it wants to meet every person online (currently there are about four billion of them). Online advertising provides opportunities even for ordinary people to create promotional campaigns and display their banners on various media.
We wanted to take an advantage of it and that’s the reason why we sent our little banner all around the world — It has already reached 300.000 people over the weekend. "When it finally reaches its goal, this banner will become the first in the world to achieve such a goal. It will be worthy of a Guinness World Record." What is more important, it will be the most viewed artwork in the history. So we have big expectations for it to succeed.
What do you think are the most important aspects of innovation that bring benefits to the public?
Art creates an opportunity for reflection — an opportunity to find answers to complex questions and make useful decisions in life, business or politics. Due to our innovative forms (online advertising), our art projects are far more accessible and more relevant to the general public.
How will you continue to develop your project?
On the one hand, we plan to improve and continue already started artistic projects, as well as to create new ones. All of them will be related to online advertising, will make people think about privacy, trust, and fraud in the online world.
On the other hand, our team consists of programmer and project managers, who are proficient in modern technology and work in innovative industries. We are thinking about creating our own cryptocurrency which would allow people to contribute to the development of our projects and even to become shareholders. It’s like acquiring Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso pieces of work when they were young and unknown artists.
If you have any ideas on how to improve, strengthen already developed initiative, or even how to rescue the world — register in “ChangeMakers’ON” hackathon which will take place on May 4–6th!
Update : the event has passed.
Do you wish to know more about ChangeMakers’ON programs? — learn more here.
Have any questions? Do you want to participate to future events? Contact us! https://www.facebook.com/ChangeMakersON/
