( 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.
