Dotdigital’s Hack Week 2024

After the excitement of Black Friday and Cyber Monday there’s one more event in the calendar that we all look forward to, Hackweek.

Our engineering teams spend most of their time making sure the software we build is performant, scalable, and bug free. Hackweek is different. Our aim is to build fast, skip the testing, and anything else that may slow us down.

This helps us to explore new and emerging technologies or ideas that we think could be great features in the future. The ideas can be wild like generating Dotdigital programs from AI using GPT4 and RAG techniques and lots of them turn into user facing features like supercharging our segmentation engine by surfacing RFM data.

In the lead up to Hackweek, everyone is invited to submit ideas and suggestions, then organize into teams to implement them. What follows is a week of rapid prototyping and implementation with a chance to flex some creative muscle by creating a video demonstrating the idea. There’s an awards ceremony where the ideas are showcased and prizes on offer for multiple categories including the much coveted Best Video and Best Team Name.

Most wanted

Hack name: Send frequency capping

Team name: Communication Cappers

The most wanted hack does exactly what it says on the tin: it caps the number of marketing emails a contact can receive in a specified period of time. This is a hotly requested feature from both Dotdigital customers and our in-house Deliverability experts; sending too many marketing emails to contacts can cause inbox exhaustion and lower engagement, risking emails landing in the spam folder if they’re perceived as unwanted by mailbox providers due to lack of engagement. 

The hack also included some thoughtful touches, such as surfacing which campaigns had been skipped for a recipient, and not applying the cap to transactional emails (things like receipts, password reset emails etc).

Best video

Hack name: AI image generator

Team name: Swat Kats

This hack was all about enabling Dotdigital users to quickly create customized AI-generated images to use in their digital marketing campaigns. Use prompts to create a selection of images, refine your prompt, and save your favorites in your image library for use in emails, MMS messages, and more. The video created by the team was slick and punchy, explained and demoed the feature really clearly, and was aptly created using AI – plus it featured an adorable hamster pilot which really won over the judges.

Most innovative

Hack name: Liquid Gold

Team name: Smartinis

Dotdigital has incredibly powerful personalization features for any marketers familiar with Liquid scripting. This hack allowed users to create complex personalization rules using a simple UI to create personalization logic rules based on values in data fields. It then automatically generates the Liquid syntax, making sophisticated personalization available to all marketers regardless of technical ability. 

CPTO special award

Hack name: Unicode, where àrt thoú?

Team name: Unicode Unravelers

One of the (fun?) challenges of SMS marketing is figuring out how to be impactful with messaging while also being very brief. Unicode characters can be really challenging – they can sneak in when you least expect it (looking at you, copying and pasting from a Word doc) and suddenly a single segment message has multiple parts. 

This incredibly thoughtful hack really caught the attention of the judges and our CPTO, Steve Shaw. The team created a simple but stunning UI enhancement that highlights unicode in-line in the messages, as well as a little button that with a single click replaces all unicode characters with smaller (cheaper) standard characters. 

They demonstrated how this could be added not just for Dotdigital customers in the editing tools, but also in internal platform areas utilized by our Support and Mobile Messaging Operations teams to help them troubleshoot. And they threw in an internal logging enhancement to boot – what legends.

People’s choice: Best hack 2024 (and best team name)

Hack name: Sneak Peak

Team name: Covert preheader collective

These two awards were voted on by all the staff at Dotdigital – and the resounding winner of both Best Hack and bragging rights for Best Team Name went to the Covert Preheader Collective. Preheader text in emails is an important hook to get your contacts opening, clicking, and engaging with your brand. This hack added a simple pre-header text editor to our campaign designer UI. The reaction from everyone: how do we NOT already have this?

If working on a platform that processes millions of pieces of data every day for some of the world’s largest companies sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring. Check out our careers page for more information. We’re hiring for multiple roles and multiple disciplines too.