It is difficult to be completely original and innovative these days. As soon as you come up with that brilliant idea you think no one has ever experienced, it gets packaged to you via the latest “hilarious” YouTube clip, Twitter message, or personal blog post making the rounds. More than ever, newer technology is giving the masses a vociferous outlet for creativity — an outlet ad agencies are now ready to exploit.
It is called crowdsourcing, and it ushers in a bold new creative turn for agencies. The term refers to a collaborative effort of crowds (typically online) to generate ideas. Basically, the agencies will rely on the interplay and bouncing around of ideas by a group of people, while they monitor and guide the community through the creative process. The idea is to get more people involved in the development of new ideas. Think creative focus groups.
The new term emerges in the midst of what some of the major advertising conglomerates are deeming a period of recovery for the industry. As Advertising Age reports that commercial time on television networks is increasing (might football season have something to do with that?), Maurice Lévy, the CEO of mega agency Publicis Groupe predicted this week that “the advertising market is starting its recovery”, and his company would enjoy organic revenue growth during this time next year.
While crowdsourcing is still new, some agencies are already on board. Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London is assembling a group of graphic artists, photographers, and filmmakers to help produce a campaign for a new product. Members of the group will divvy up $20,000 between them, and the winner gets an internship in the agency.
Hmmm. Sounds more like “cheap-labor-sourcing” to me.
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Photo by James Cridland, used under a Creative Commons license.
This is a fascinating trend. Thanks for the excellent write-up. Lots of crowdsourced ideas are already out there. What has been lacking are right tools to find them. TipTop semantic search engine, now available in a beta version at http://FeelTipTop.com, shows how the best ideas and people can be found with little effort. Please give it a spin. We also have a special for Halloween costume-related ideas on our site this week which you wouldn’t want to miss. Crowdsourcing – both explicitly organized or implicitly done via smart tools like TipTop – is here to stay.
Hey Adam, great article and nice to see ad creative crowdsourcing getting some well-deserved attention as a new model for 21st century ad agencies.
But please don’t dismiss all crowdsourcing efforts as just “cheap-labor-sourcing.”
Many of us in the industry are working damn hard to create durable value for both creators and buyers in a new model for advertising creative. We’re finding the right ways to do that as we go.
But I think you’ll find that all the enduring models avoid what Nicolas Carr has called ‘Digital Sharecropping’ — http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/03/meanwhile_back.php