News – Careers & Tenders
INVITATION TO TENDER: digital marketing agency for the Longitude Prize on ALS
20 January 2025
About the Longitude Prize on ALS
The Longitude Prize on ALS, led by Challenge Works, is a multi-million-pound, international challenge prize to incentivise the use of AI to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS. ALS is currently untreatable, with only one medication that can slow progress of the disease. The Prize could result in the discovery of a cure, saving lives globally.
The Prize is looking for groundbreaking approaches to identification and validation of new targets, from those working in the biotechnology, AI and academic audiences.
These audiences will each have different barriers to entry, use different communications platforms and value different incentives.
What are we commissioning?
Challenge Works is looking for a digital agency that can understand, engage and excite each of these audiences, using digital channels to drive them to enter the prize and create a buzz around the scale of opportunity in a way that tactically captures their attention.
Deadline for submissions: 5pm (GMT), Friday 31st January 2025
Deliverables
Activity may include, but is not limited to:
- Refining audience segments for use in digital outreach, including social
- Campaign development and planning
- Video, infographics and other content creation
- Targeted, paid-for activity including web banners, social media activity, Google ads, traditional out-of-home advertising, paid-for partnerships – directed to innovators to support Challenge Prize recruitment process
- Experiential activity
- Paid social media – in conjunction with Challenge Works communications
- Ad-hoc deliverables: to be defined and agreed.
- Monitoring and evaluation to measure the reach and impact of the campaign
Any supplier would need to have considerable experience in these areas. We welcome examples of previous work in these areas to showcase your expertise, and will be looking for both an approach to campaign development and to marketing channels in your response.
We are also looking for an agency that is willing to be agile and can demonstrate how it would ‘test and learn’ throughout the challenge to ensure that activity is truly effective. When you pitch, we would like to see how you think about the different audiences (E.g. innovator vs influencers) will be integrated via the different channels like the website, social media etc.
It is important that the awareness raised from the previous Longitude Prizes is leveraged for the campaign.
Tender details
Types of Services
We are looking for written proposals and quotations from potential suppliers to provide specialist creative and digital marketing support across engaging and persuading entrants from biotech, AI and academic audiences to get excited and engage with the prize.
Key Audiences
Potential innovators; we anticipate that potential innovators will come from a range of sectors, including:
- All Biotech, Techbio, AI and Pharma currently active in the ALS or neurodegenerative space,
- Biotech and Techbio not presently active in ALS who could participate
- The global ALS research community,
- The neurodegeneration research community, particularly those working in FTD, Dementia, Parkinson’s etc,
- Academics specialising in AI/ML for health.
This tender will be looking for responses for supporting Stage 1 of the prize, with a focus on innovator recruitment from target audience (drug discovery biotech, computational biologist and health AI specialists and the neurodegenerative disease scientific communities) awareness and engagement.
How to apply
Please download the invitation to tender for full details.
Deadline for submissions
Your entire proposal, including all supporting documentation, should be no more than 15 pages with single-spaced text in 12-point font and on A4 paper. Your proposal should be e-mailed as a single document, to [email protected] by no later than 5pm GMT on Friday 31st January 2025.
Please submit your proposal to Nesta in accordance with all the instructions and terms and conditions set out within the attached documentation.