Crowdsourcing or the sourcing of work to your audience for the purpose of receiving or generating new ideas is a relatively new concept. The internet has made the transfer of ideas lightning fast and what may have taken months to survey person by person or through direct mail can now be done in a fraction of the time.
Advertisers are challenged daily with the task of keeping up with culture and most of the time can at best only react to it. Crowdsourcing now gives advertisers the ability to be more proactive in the creative process by allowing consumers to tell companies what their really after, taking the guess work out of it. Companies such as Threadless are common examples that produce only consumer generated products. By crowdsourcing users for designs and then only printing the communities most popular t-shirts (which are tracked through pre-orders) they relive much of the risk associated with a new idea. DraftFCB art director/ designer Michael Yohan applauds Threadless’ business model but warns of the danger in crowdsourcing, stating, “Companies need to retain/ maintain the integrity of what the crowd/audience really says and not bastardize it so that it’s what they believe to be more commercially viable”. This also leads into the issue of intellectual property. While users may be generating fantastic ideas, advertisers must be aware of who truly owns those ideas and will benefit from them.
So what does this all mean for creatives in advertising? Will agencies cut out the middleman and go straight to the consumer for ideas. It’s hard for a copywriter to argue that their idea will sell better to the masses than an idea that the masses have already decided upon themselves. The fact still remains for crowdsourcing to work agencies will have to ask the right questions and the ability to ask the right question will become an increasingly sought out skill. The days of simply being a big idea or concept guy are quickly coming to an end. Creatives seeking jobs in the evolving advertising world will need to bring more skills to the table and an ability to produce ideas is invaluable. Agencies are learning to evolve and collaborate with their audiences, leading to more creative advertising that truly resinates with their consumers and builds a greater since of ownership in the brand.
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