Last week, founding partner and CEO of Essence, Matt Isaacs said the agency sought to “find the champions of innovation in this market.” In doing so, Essence launched these awards as part of ongoing SEEK innovation programme to seek out and celebrate the most innovative new technology in digital communications.

The SEEK advisory board narrowed the 40 entrants down to eight finalists, which were then presented at an event at the Royal Society for the Arts in London last week. At the event, the eight finalists presented their work and the winners were subsequently chosen by a crowdsourced vote and the panel of three judges.

The overall winner was Drawbridge, a cross-device pairing technology that matches users across devices without using personal information, as does Google or the iCloud.

Isaacs says, “As an agency, innovation and constant change in the marketing industry have been significant drivers in the success of Essence and of our clients. It’s a great honour for me to be able to say that we are uncovering the next generation of innovators that are going to drive change in an ever-evolving marketing industry. We congratulate Drawbridge on winning and well done to our seven other fantastic finalists on making it so far; the line up was impressive.”

The crowd favourite from the first half of the presentations was Stipple, a company that automatically reintroduces the metadata that are stripped from photos on social media. This allows for more effective advertising and content marketing. Other presentations tackled similarly difficult problems in the digital space.