In 2008 a friend pointed me to a site called 99designs. The site’s purpose is to provide design solutions through open competition. A client proposes a brief and sets a ‘prize’, designers then submit concepts to compete for this ‘prize’ with one design taking the winnings.
Back then I thought it was just spec work on a larger scale, and presumed the demand for good design and good business practice would keep sites like this to a mere annoyance. Sadly, 2 years later, the term ‘crowdsourcing’ is now part of our lexicon and high profile crowdsourcing campaigns are increasingly being unleashed on the world.
Last year Unilever ditched Lowe as their Peperami brand handler in favour of crowdsourcing. The brief for the ad was posted online by Crowdsourcing specialists Idea Bounty with a $10,000 prize for the winning idea. Anyone could enter. The winning idea was aired last month.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vRJWpDakA8&w=610&h=368]
According to Matt Burgess, Peperami managing director, “Today’s consumers are looking for new levels of brand engagement and this experiment shows that for the right brand, such as Peperami, crowdsourcing can be an excellent vehicle for creative consumer interaction.” But I think the competition (which was ultimately won by two advertising creatives who shared the prize) lacked the big new idea Unilever and Idea Bounty were hoping for. To me its a mildly humorous retread of the classic Lintas work of the 90s. It seems Peperami has Crowdsourced creative ideas for an already strong brand and advertising style, so the creative agency had already done all the hard work and the client saves considerably by letting the public contribute the last piece.
Only 1,185 entered the Peperami competition though, perhaps due to the extent of the input required, too much hard work for some? Well in August, more than 1.6 million votes were cast to decide the outcome of the BT Jane and Adam storyline cliffhanger, with 70% voting for Jane to be pregnant. Created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, the new ad continues the story arc that began with actors Kris Marshall and Esther Hall back in 2005. Perhaps BT’s crowdsource success was due to their short, swift television and Facebook campaign, or perhaps the lack of imagination required by the general public did it (seriously, watching the preceding ads, what else was the public going to decide their fate to be?).
More recently I hear Gap are to crowdsource their logo after the social media backlash against the rubbish they released last month. Their actions reek of “we’re afraid of the public, so we’ll let them take over”.
And it gets more surreal, today I read that Durex plan to launch a crowd sourcing campaign despite every art director and creative the world over having a great durex ad idea up their sleeve. The most worrying part of this free pitch request is the prize “The winner of the competition receives £2,000 and the spot will air on MTV.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against new methods of creativity, I know a social collective brings innovation, and the benefits to the client are obvious- casting an enormous net to pick and choose the fish they catch. But the ready availability of cheap media tools with the greater demand for quick turnover creates a supply of low quality work. As Eric Hillerns’ commented on the pro-crowd sourcing polemic in Forbes Jan 2009 “A CAD program does not make me an architect and a copy of QuickBooks does not make me an accountant…”.
This form of spec work is not going away, in fact as we’ve seen in the last year crowdsourcing is rapidly migrating from the fringe to the mainstream and the potential to damage the design industry could be significant. I recommend reading this article which details 6 reasons crowdsourcing is a bad idea, but to summarise:
• It’s not a productive use of time
• It’s not good for long-term business relationships
• It kills creativity
• It can hurt brand reputation
• It generally results in poor work
I think the design and advertising industry have a responsibility to stand up for our craft, to educate our clients and the public of the importance of good, quality design over the quick and the cheap. As designer and architect Barry Sheehan said to the Irish Times this week “Design is a crucial part of the economy, but it’s often portrayed as superficial, a luxury, rather than something at the core of everything we do”. At a critical time like this, lets not shoot ourselves in the foot by jumping on the crowdsourcing bandwagon.
