Stay Tuned: A new directory of the coolest crowdsourced competitions to come!

A new simple directory of some of the coolest projects will be online soon: this will only represent a handful of the thousands of projects out there. But it'll be a good place to start.

Every week or so I get a flurry of emails announcing the latest and greatest creative brief. They come from all sorts of open crowdsourced platforms, for all kinds of clients. Big global brands and local players. They need creative ideation for every imaginable media: online, experiential, print, mobile device and they offer thousands of dollars. Of course I can't enter them all myself!

So, this is a shout out to all the emerging design and creative talent out there that has the bandwidth to take a shot and win!

Big Brand, Big Challenge: Siemens and Zooppa

Check this out at Zooppa!

Start storyboarding some ideas now - your creativity is worth $40,000! (15 cash prizes - 1st place is a whopping 15k!)

"Create a video, between 2 minutes (120 seconds) and 5 minutes (300 seconds) long, exploring how improvements in one of the following areas can change your city, or any city, around the world for the better. "

The wisdom of crowds?

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." Henry Ford

One tends to never think of the general crowd as wise, it may just be a matter of semantics. In crowdsouring, the “crowds” are not crowded together so they won’t necessarily act like an unruly mob during a public demonstration. The “groupthink” disappears only if the members of the crowd have the privacy to think on their own. Then there's the concept of co-creation on a open crowdsourced platform that never seems to get beyond the “I like it” stage, some moderate infighting and some vacuous suggestions on the forums.
The contradiction for me in the co-creation arena is that we’re dealing with a competition. You can’t ignore the ego of the creative individuals who want to have the winning solution. Or least I can’t!

What kind of client needs 1200 solutions for one problem?

No client does, ever. if a brief can generate 1200 viable, actionable solutions then the brief is wrong.

You’ve heard it all before, if you don’t state the problem clearly enough you’ll never get the right answers.

For the sake of privacy and respect for the platform. I will keep the link unpublished.

The crowd on this particular site is livid with the choice of winning solution. It’s an open crowd working on a high profile (local) project. The solution was universally panned and the client never actually adopted it.

This will happen. Even in fully functioning ad agencies on the ground. It just happens a 1000 time less often and hardly raises the ire of it’s creative employees. They are on a payroll after all.

Keep your crowds happy. Reveal a short list and explain why the winning solution won. ( I know, I'm repeating myself, but I think it's important. I also understand the sensitivity the client/brand may have to releasing all the solutions with regards to IP and proprietary details, but in most cases the intellectually property belongs to the participant unless they are compensated for the winning result)

How to piss off your uncurated crowd in 5 easy steps.

Crowdsource platforms come and go. The more established and productive ones do  the opposite of this:

1. don’t update your news channel/blog regularly
2. don’t showcase winners or winning solutions (with respect to NDAs)
3. cancel projects or extend deadlines
4. show winning solutions without explaining why they won
5. don’t hire experienced creative experts* to manage even your uncurated platform

*Can you manage the platform effectively if you’ve never been on the “creators/participants” side?

next up: How to get the most out of your crowd.

How do we avoid creating “The Homer”?

We can’t all be right.

Ask 100 consumers what they want and you’ll get a lot of similar requests, ask 10,000 and their collective desires become more nebulous. That’s the essential problem with creative thinking and "co-creation" from the non-expert crowd. Of course you need an expert filter to get to the essence of their desires and if you don’t have one, you end up with a car that Homer built.

The pendulum is swinging well in the court of the consumer these days. It's not a fad, it's fact. When the tide turns again, organizations who embraced crowdsourcing principles will be ahead of the curve and at advantage on the next swing.

What’s “like” got to do with it?

In order to encourage participation with any online event, story, video, etc. we’ve made it easy to share or announce our approval. But it’s also too easy. In the open crowdsource community, on any given platform, if the only assertion from other members is “ I like it”, discussion come grinding to a halt. We’ve stopped thinking.

Then there are those who will "game the system" just going for the big numbers. Even aside from the gamers, 100,000 likes for a brand page does not automatically  translate into anything real;  one "like" is a very long way from, "I'm buying it". 

Are our netizens more "creative" than ever?

More creative minds, talented voices, animators, etc, than ever before? Emphatically, no! Our scrapbooks full of poems and paintings are just transparent, visible to all. There just appears to be more creative output than ever before. What is new, exciting and may lead to a renaissance of creativity is the ability to collaborate on a global scale with virtually anyone in any field, expert and novice. Just one little problem: how do we enable true collaboration across the net? I know we have all the analog tools for communication now digitized and live online, the problem of successfully communicating and supporting a point of view remains. And the gap between amateur and professional does not diminish because of the net, but if you don't know the "language" of the professional, or can decipher the insights of the amateur there can be no collaboration between these groups. No app for that. 

Leveling the playing field and diminishing the gap between amateurs and professionals.

The title of this post has many iterations and this concept appears more and more often in various online discussions and sites dedicated to exploring crowdsourcing ideas.

It’s an odd thing to assert however. The “Democratization of Everything” (DOE, pronounced “d’uh?”) can never diminish the gap between amateurs and professionals just because they play in the same sandbox (where on any typical open CS platform there is virtually no true collaboration between members of the crowd). That’s not to say that either group – including the continuum of amateur to professional – can not learn from each other through observation. A good teacher always learns from their students. But the assertion that an open crowdsourced platform narrows the gaps between the expert and the novice assumes that the experience, principles and learning that an expert brings to a problem is the same as a novice who has none of those things to offer apart from a passion to compete.

The germ of the idea can truly be sourced from absolutely anyone. But to nurture it, to make it truly special, requires an expertise that takes years of education and practice.

So why do brands bother with the CS platforms in the first place? (Post on this topic, to come)

Are the crowds too big to burn out?

( The following is my take on a current, now closed contest: I won't reveal the platform, or client and the numbers have been changed marginally)

There should be a never ending supply of fresh talent. Well, millions of egos and brains anyway. And of course there are more and more CS platforms every month it seems. So why, when a 5K prize is offered to anyone to work (uncurated) on an iconic brand, only 26 entries were submitted, 8 of which are identical to one another, and the rest repeat the content of the brief. Not one idea worthy of exploration. This is not some media channel filler material that the client was looking for. They were looking for some deeper thinking, a creative solution and are open to collaboration.

So what happened?

The challenge was tough. (It's always tough! Even for professionals.) The open crowd may have the technical resources to create a simple animation. But true, insightful ideas that make people take notice and change behavior is still very much in the domain of the experts. And 5K is not much of a carrot to them anyway.

When the madding crowds produce maddening results.

The more people you ask for an opinion, the further away you get from innovation. You just end up with one big hammer pounding the same old nail.

I’m watching the development of symbols/logos on a crowdsource platform that’s posed a very difficult but high profile assignment. Over 8000 posted results, but with only a handful that are actually thoughtful and unique. The vast majority simply replicate what's already been done.

What does this tell us about the open crowd? They need a lot more managing and guidance for better results.

(also see the car that Homer built "The Homer")

Big open crowd? Bigger Ideas?

By definition, the level of engagement with a big open (uncurated) crowd will be small. You can only have a “forum” relationship with your community. They may generate huge quantities of ideas that may or may not contain real insight but only a very small percentage will have any value for the client, even as simple media channel “filler material”. (more on the proliferation of "infotainment" content production later)

For the more succinct briefs that require a greater degree of relevant ideation/innovation and finish, tapping the expert crowd is the most fruitful. Both client and platform guide the ideation process.

But if you give both types of crowds the same brief, no matter how large the open crowd is, the amount of successful, relevant ideas produced is very small. That's not really a bad thing. The brief should be so tight that you get a lot of very similar solutions.

Watch any logo contest. (This is the most basic of all CS competitions, and yet logo-design is actually a very difficult subjective process even when you have a personal relationship with the client.) It's a very good petri dish for examining the way open crowds work and think. A logo design is unforgiving. You can judge the expertise of any graphic designer by looking at their logo portfolio first. On the open platforms, everyone can play, but it becomes obvious very quickly who had no concept of design. The playing field may be level, it's all nice and democratic but only those with some expert knowledge of design will actually win.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Ideas come from everywhere and from anyone, the big idea too, but typically that takes more work and deeper thinking. You can crowdsource a logo anytime, but if you need brain surgery it’s best to get an expert. ( I know, that analogy sucks but you get the idea) General, soft content can come from the open crowd, focused and salient marketing ideas come from the more dedicated expert crowd. And of course the payment model is different: it's less of a lottery and in some case all participants get paid.

Chivas J&J comes to Shanghai...

The crowd is invited to come up with new ways to make Chivas J&J the trendiest new drink in swanky Shanghai bars and KTV's.

Another very cool project from eYeka!