Launchmetrics’ newest initiative seeks to bring the beauty-tech landscape to the fore.

The information research and insights company has joined forces with MAC Cosmetics and Microsoft to host a knowledge hackathon from Nov. 17 through Nov. 21, called Beauty Hacks.

The competition, which can happen in Microsoft’s Technology Center in Paris, will allow students from France’s top business, engineering and tech schools to research data from Launchmetrics’ proprietary data set with a view to determine easy methods to improve the performance of beauty brands on social media. 

“For us, it is sensible to be the middleman between a worldwide technology player like Microsoft and a business like MAC,” said Michael Jaïs, cofounder and chief executive officer of Launchmetrics. “It’s not that common for data scientists to take into consideration beauty as the primary vertical to go after.” 

The Hackathon’s 30 participants might be split into groups of 5, with the team that develops the very best algorithm to enhance post reach and engagement winning a grand prize of 5,000 euros. 

While members of the judges panel haven’t yet been revealed, the judges (who may also function coaches throughout the competition), will consist of top data analysts from firms present in the course of the competition. 

Said Gilles d’Aramon, general manager of world partner solutions France at Microsoft, in an email to WWD, “By combining Launchmetrics’ unique know-how in measuring and optimizing brand performance with Microsoft’s Data and AI expertise, we’ve got an exciting opportunity to assist luxury, fashion and sweetness firms implement successful brand strategies.”

With this competition, Launchmetrics, Microsoft and MAC seek to focus on how involving participants from different disciplines and mixing their varied approaches to the identical objective could make for increasingly lucrative results. 

“Any such collaboration between developers, data scientists and other people who deal directly with businesses may be very rare, so I’m excited to see what comes of that,” Jaïs said. “If at the top of the hackathon, we’re able where persons are saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t see the issue that way,’ or ‘The tactic you proposed to solving this makes total sense and we’d have never considered that,’ for me, that might be probably the most beautiful result.”