MediaTech Festival by Media City Odense
Media City Odense is organising Denmark’s largest MediaTech Festival from June 1st until June 3rd. This two and a half day conference will guarantee to inspire you, give you new knowledge and insights on topics you weren’t even debating yet. It is the place to be for anyone interested in media, communication, marketing, production and technology. But who is Media City Odense and what is this festival? We’ll tell you all about it in this article
Media City Odense: Denmark’s first media cluster
Media City Odense is a non-profit media-organisation that originated from TV 2 Denmark, Jysk Fynske Media, University of Southern Denmark and TV 2 Fyn. With a mission to create the most value generating media tech cluster in Denmark, Media City Odense fosters innovation and collaboration. By creating meeting places and cooperating with relevant people in the Danish and international media ecosystem, they expand their network every day. Another of their core values is working with students and mediatech startups and making sure that the distance between them and the industry is as short as possible. Anne Scheel Nordestgaard Dyrehauge, CEO at Media City Odense, describes her work as follows: “We create collaboration and you can do that without us, but you can do it better with us.” To summarise, this cluster of media organisations in Denmark facilitates collaboration to create results.
Anne Scheel Nordestgaard Dyrehauge from Media City Odense
Created only a year and a half ago, in the midst of the corona pandemic, Media City Odense already has a lot of interesting projects. For example, “AI in the newsroom”: a 3 year project that originated out of a first-time collaboration between Danish Media (Jysk Fynske Medier, TV 2 and TV 2 Fyn) and the Digital Democracy Centre of the University of Southern Denmark. In this project, PhD students and postdoctorates look into the impact of new technologies on news production and the journalistic work process. AI is more than just the negative consequences, instead AI could actually strengthen democratic dialogue and could offer many opportunities in journalism. This collaboration wants to take AI out of the lonely field of tech giants and bring it directly to developers and journalists.
This AI path is only one of the many things that they’ll focus on in the next couple of years. One of MCO’s other recent projects is in collaboration with “The SDU Fellowship'' where fellow Gerd Maria May, founder of Room of Solutions, will focus on constructive journalism and work with MCO’s media partners to inspire action. More specifically, on how to create journalism that actually engages and activates people to do something about climate change.
Next to these projects, MCO is working on very exciting and interesting topics that will be announced soon. With their ambition to grow to 30 members by the end of the year, Media City Odense is opening up and aiming to create more opportunities and valuable collaborations for members. Anne summarises it beautifully as the cluster power: “we’re not out there micromanaging saying that you have to expand and collaborate with this and that. But because we’ve created lots of meeting opportunities where people could get together, that enabled collaborations and the mere presence and existence of MCO has gotten people together to create”.
In the interview, she even gave us a sneak peak into one of their long-term ambitions to create a national cluster that has its heart in Odense with a physical Media City Odense office.
Member of the Future Media Hubs
Since the end of 2021, Media City Odense has been one of the members of Future Media Hubs, more specificaly a member of the Sandbox Hub, where media organisations form partnerships with start-ups to help develop their innovations and scale up their businesses. In monthly Hub-meetings, members share their learnings and insights from different cases. They even ask each other for help if they encounter specific problems. Through this international network that Future Media Hubs facilitates, members can actually learn from and get inspired by each other.
Next to knowledge sharing and getting inspired, Future Media Hubs also brings in start-ups to pitch before all their members and by doing this, FMH connects start-ups with other media organisations and fosters collaboration. Another of FMH’s activities is supporting their members at events, like the MediaTech Festival in Odense. Because of MCO’s membership in the Sandbox Hub, FMH was invited to organise a pitch event during the festival. It’s a win-win situation for both parties: while FMH helps MCO with the workload, they also get exposure during the festival and pitch competition.
MediaTech Festival
The idea for the festival is one that already originated a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, the pandemic had an effect on the whole world and thus also on Odense. They had to postpone their idea until more certain times were coming, and here they are. It’s 2022 and it’s time for the very first edition of the MediaTech Festival of Media City Odense, an event that will hopefully become THE event of the year for Scandinavians and Europeans in media, production, marketing and so much more.
something that would make us visible and that would connect people
The festival is the place to be in June for many reasons. First: the great keynotes that are given by various, relevant people in the industry. The Festival will kick off with a keynote from Naja Nielsen (Digital Director BBC News) about why digital strategies are necessary. Thursday morning will start with a keynote from Lars Tvede about Super Trends and how to use AI to predict the future. Another speaker at the festival is journalist Yusuf Omar from SEEN (previously known as Hashtag Our Stories), who’ll give you all the details about mobile journalism and wearable items and finally Meta and Google will tell us about the future, followed by an on-stage discussion with media leaders on Friday. You can find the full program on mediacityodense.dk/en/mediatech-festival
Aside from keynotes and interesting discussions, you can also attend the pitch competition hosted by Future Media Hubs. On Thursday June 2nd, from 4.30 – 5.30pm, five pre-selected European start-ups will compete against each other before a very interesting jury. Our first member is Thomas Visti, who has a lot of knowledge about the robotics industry and is a renowned investor in Denmark. Next you have Morten Andersen from FST Growth, who invests specifically in MediaTech start-ups, and last but not least there is Louise Brandstrup Zastrow, founder of the startup Travel Kollekt. This combination of different expertises from the jury will make sure that the best startup will win the competition.
Now, you are surely wondering who’ll actually be the pitching start-ups.
First up is TrollRensics. To track disinformation and hybrid warfare campaigns on social media, they developed new software, based on AI and network analysis. They offer tailor-made workshops for journalists to use their software for investigations. Find out more about TrollRensics on trollrensics.com
Second, AdHash cuts out the ad tech middleman and brings efficiency, trust and privacy. They believe that transparency and accountability should be the default state of digital advertising. AdHash therefore hosts a platform that allows advertisers and publishers to serve and manage ads and collect performance data without there being any intermediaries. Get to know this team of ad tech specialists, designers, software engineers and data scientists on adhash.com
MediaCatch is the third start-up and specialises in AI in media monitoring, diversity tracking and sponsorship analytics. They steer away from the big tech corporations and want to aid purpose-driven companies in creating change and making better business decisions. MediaCatch sees their AI software as a stepping stone for the next generations of brand perception. Learn more about them and their mission on mediacatch.io
Next is Questpass, a start-up that combines a moneyless paywall with a new ad format. They want to revolutionise the online advertising game by gatekeeping on the basis of content. Questpass will only display one ad with 100% visibility, but this ad will have much more impact on the user and 0% banner blindness. The user just has to answer a question about the ad to get the content for free. Find out more about how it works on questpass.pl
Last but certainly not least, our fifth startup is Geneea. This technological startup focuses on AI-based solutions for media houses to help them publish more engaging articles. You might already know them from their products ‘Media Assistant’ and ‘Article Generator’. The former is a tool that supports journalists in their work, while the latter composes news articles based on data from different sources. Learn more about Geneea’s products on geneea.com
Don’t miss this opportunity to get to meet between 300 and 600 interesting and leading people in the industry and be sure to visit the main stage on Thursday at 4.30pm to find out which startup wins!
You can still buy your tickets at mediacityodense.dk/en/mediatech-festival
