Duel lets you generate content from your social audience
Business name: Duel
URL: http://about.duel.me
Twitter: @duel
Sector: Social Media Marketing, Technology, B2B, Innovation,
Based in: London, UK
Regions covered: UK, US, Worldwide
Founders:
Paul Archer: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/paul-archer-1326b068
Panagiotis Tsarouchis (Naio): https://uk.linkedin.com/in/iamnaio
What do each of you do?
Paul Archer is the Founder and Managing Director
Naio is the Co-founder and Head of Tech
Who are your major backers?
Downing Ventures
What’s the track record?
Went live Dec 2015, Launched Star Wars: The Force Awakens in London, Unilever Foundry 50, SXSW L’Oreal/Unilever/Coke Brand Pitch Winner. Less than 5 months in clients including Twitter, BBC Top Gear Magazine, Kobalt Music and even 90s pop sensation Macy Grey!
What’s the elevator pitch?
Duel is an attempt to build the world best content ranking system. It helps brands, businesses and anyone with an audience to achieve more growth, drive engagement and get access to user generated content by running fully automated contests and polls.
What does this mean?
Duel is powered by a unique human-augmented intelligence ranking algorithm which allows brands to crowd-source the content, then automatically rank and moderate it as well, making it effortless and highly effective for the client and, most importantly, fun for the participants.
Duel’s web based ‘no download required’ content submission process gives the client the rights to reuse the user generated content and contact details of the participants for future marketing campaigns. Alternatively, brands and businesses can also upload their own content to Duel and ask their audience to vote on their favourites.
What makes your company different from its competitors?
The idea of using the crowd to make binary decisions between two things to rank and sort huge amounts of content is, as far as we know, unique. Our competitors are trying to make small improvements on the current competition models such as hashtags, and Facebook apps. Duel is an entirely new approach and acts as a stand-alone channel and hosting patform.
Who are your clients?
Duel was first used to launch Star Wars with CineWorld in London. Currently we are working with publishers such as Immediate Media, some well-known agencies and a number of smaller businesses/startups that use Duel on day-to-day basis. Duel was also used at Twitter Live and will be used at Cannes Lions with Unilever Foundry (This must be kept a secret until the 14th of May).
How will your company change the world?
We are trying to build the best ranking system in the world. Our current system allows us to deliver it as a powerful social tool to help businesses grow their audience, brand awareness and sales through the automation of engagement via contests, polls, challenges and idea generation.
However, this is just the start. We want to become a platform to empower audiences to make incredibly fair decisions with all kinds of content.
Who do you compete with?
Hashtag contest platforms such as Woobox, Shuttlerock and platforms that integrate with social to drive UGC such as Olapic, Votigo or Gleam. Marketing automation software such as EngageSciences or Offerpop. Additionally polling software such as Apester and Playbuzz.
Who should be worried?
Anyone who still uses hashtags to run a contest/competition.
If you could choose any investor globally who would it be?
Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures
If you could poach any member of staff from any company in the world who would it be?
We would poach growth hacking extraordinaire, Andrew Chen. He is a genius. But I’m not sure we could match what Uber are doing.
