Crowdsourcing - Pros and Cons

If you haven't heard of crowdsourcing before, it is, in short, harnessing the power of crowds to generate ideas. That's how proponents would categorize it. Critics, on the other hand, suggest that it is little more than exploitive contests. I have mixed opinions on the idea. Whatever the case, it is fairly innovative as a concept.

Crowdsourcing as a concept has existed for a while. Whether you talk about Wikipedia, open source software or futures market theory projects like DARPA's much-maligned Policy Analysis Market, crowds of people are able to create more, generate better solutions or forecast better than any one individual or company. Crowdsourcing as discussed so often in media today refers to the many different companies who have sprung up to connect companies with large groups of people such as Innocentive, Atizo, Idea Bounty to name just a few.

This latest varient uses a contest format with large cash prizes to tempt individuals to submit ideas. I must admit I came across this rather late. I first heard about it in through the Idea Bounty Peparami brief which garnered a lot of headlines. It sounded like fun to pit your wits against other creative writers (presumably other ad agency copywriters) with a potential payout of $10,000. I spent about 3 hours in total writing up one TV commercial and two print ads proposals and I was in the top 100 out of 1000+ entrants. Apparently, I'll get some kind of prize for doing that well.

It's hard to tell whether this is a fad or a real future trend. Having surfed the idea a bit, I can tell you a LOT of ad agency people are utterly disgusted by this concept -- a cheap outsourcing of creative work. To some degree, I agree with this. An agency would be paid several hundred thousand for a similar campaign. Shouldn't the winner have received something similar?

On the other hand, this money would be split into salary and production costs. And the copywriter, AD or CD who originated the idea is not likely to get that much in compensation for their idea. I think it is worth mentioning that $10,000 is no small chunk of change even for ad execs making $60 000 - 100 000 per year. As far as I know, unless you are a partner in an ad agency, you are not likely to make anything near $10,000 (presuming hours worked) for generating a single nationwide marketing campaign idea.


I also agree with the argument made by some ad execs that ad agency people spend too much time inside advertising world without looking out. Diversity is maybe the biggest plus for crowdsourcing --ie outside-the-box thinking garnered by non-industry insiders. (That has worked for many solutions at Innocentive.) On the other hand, both winners of the brief were former long time industry pros.


Will I continue to submitting crowdsourcing ideas? Maybe, I don't see spending 30-60 minutes for the chance at a large payout to be time poorly spent. I might spend that time just surfing the web for news articles.

Stay inspired!

Cheers,
Maurice
www.voiceone.fi