In the spring 2014 technology company Reaktor wanted to expand to international markets. The problem was, Reaktor's bleeding edge reputation was not internationally recognized.

A notable feature of the IT industry is that decision makers truly listen to technology experts: that is, the coders. Therefore, we decided to get the attention of the decision makers via those influential coders.

The big problem in getting to these coders was that there was no single forum where all the best coders in the world would hang out. We thought competitions would be a fun way of engaging with the coders.

HWO spread like wildfire on social media, earning shares and retweets from coding celebrities.

Technology media covered the competition widely and traditional media quickly followed, with a near zero media budget.

The competition reached 300 million people via social and earned media.

Together, 4152 top coders from 92 countries made HWO bigger than the Sochi Olympics.

On average teams spent over 40 hours on the task and 99% of the participants would attend again.

Projected revenue in the USA and Japan is expected to rise from nothing to 2–3 million euros in 2015, with deals secured with world-class clientele.

Spring 2014 we decided to organise the first ever Coding World Championships.

The task was to create a 3D-visualised artificial intelligence for a virtual race car. The owner of the fastest car would be crowned the world’s best coder.

After online qualifying rounds, every regions best teams were brought to sold-out live finals held in Helsinki in front of a thousand-headed audience. With state-of-the-art 3D-visualisation, the finals resembled more a Formula 1 race than a coding competition. Coders were the rock stars.

In total, the event spanned from the invitations sent in March to the culmination of live finals on June 10th.

Although coders are competitive and willing to showcase their skill, they are also extremely critical and selective of their association with brands. This makes them a hard to reach target audience.

Traditional coding competitions are nerdy and serious and you have to be an expert to understand what is happening, who’s winning and why. We wanted to redefine coding competitions and create something as exciting as Formula 1.

We chose to target the coders through social media, a-list coding celebrities and earned media.

The idea was to create coding superstars and crown the Sebastian Vettels of coding.