Wildcats: The Sparki Innovation Challenge

APEC designed Sparki as a sensor to support machinery in the mining industry, then realised the technology could do far more. Working with Wildcats, the global incubator platform, it wanted to crowdsource use cases from young people in Vietnam and Thailand that could make their communities better, with cash rewards for the best ideas.

The difficulty was the subject. An industrial sensor is neither visible nor exciting to a Gen Z audience, and the recruitment window was four weeks across two languages. The challenge needed a hook that could make a piece of mining hardware feel like something worth thinking about.

The creative answer was to give the sensor a personality. Ruder Finn Era turned Sparki into a cute pixel-art mascot in a gamified format, so the product became a character to play with rather than a specification to read. Every piece of content, in Vietnamese and Thai, was built around that character across the four-week recruitment period.

Distribution followed where Gen Z already was: Facebook pages, TikTok videos and filters, and a multi-country digital marketing plan with tracking to optimise spend. Education, tech and engineering nano-influencers and university professors lent credibility, and partner universities ran mini-challenges within their own communities with extra rewards. The challenge hit its participation KPIs and two winners were selected at the end of the incubation process.