A new model for gathering consumer insights?

If you know what they really want and you build it, will they come?

Consumer focus groups get tainted by group dynamics and facilitator bias. I say this only based on prior experience and observation, there are ways to mitigate these effects but can you still trust the results?

When the big brands participate in crowdsourcing for advertising ideas, do they care if they can't actually run or post these efforts on their media channels? It does not really matter. For very little money, they can actually buy some true consumer insights; how their product/service is perceived by the creative consumer is captured in the solutions that they post. At least that's my premise. I think the challenge is in how you write the crowdsource brief. Take note that crowdsource creative briefs look nothing like the ones that a commissioned advertising agency would see. They are vague and stripped of any real information about the brand. And of course, all brand guidelines are ignored as well.

Major Research Project - Introduction 1.

It's time to start crystallizing a direction and research topic for my MRP (major research project at OCAD U). SInce the focus of this blog was originally on open sourced idea generation for the private sector I think I will park my ideas here.

Working towards a definition of crowdsourcing

Here’s a formal definition (below) that I think is worthy of further consideration. It touches upon a very critical issue: the crowd is asked to engage in a process that helps build the profit margins of a company for free. ( valuable data is mined even from some of the unworkable solutions) And when a crowdsourced solution is rewarded, that dollar amount is far below it’s real value to the firm

“Crowdsourcing takes place when a profit oriented firm outsources specific tasks essential for the making or sale of its product to the general public (the crowd) in the form of an open call over the internet, with the intention of animating individuals to make a contribution to the firm's production process for free or for significantly less than that contribution is worth to the firm. Firms engage in crowdsourcing to inexpensively mobilize the creative work of sometimes highly skilled persons as a resource for the generation of value and profits. Tasks that lend themselves to crowdsourcing include product design, advertising, quality monitoring, and the solution of specific technical problems….”

Science, Technology & Innovation Studies Vol. 4, No 1, July 2008

From: Frank Kleemann, G. Günter Voß Kerstin Rieder Un(der)paid Innovators: The Commercial Utilization of Consumer Work through Crowdsourcing

The Crowdsourcing numbers game.

There seems to be a sense of pride for some platforms when they announce the stats of their community.

One contest actually boasted that it had over 15,000 logo ideas. The reality is, in this case, that they really had less than 10 that had any merit (as determined by there professional curators and client). So what’s the point of talking about your “big” numbers? Does it attract clients?

If big numbers attracts more clients it may just start to scare away your crowd. Participants often invest many hours in a crowdsourced project. The more participants, the less chance of a payday. It’s simple arithmetic. 

The bigger the open crowd the more cognitive debris.

If you invite anyone to the party and don’t check their bags at the door be prepared for a very big clean up when it's all over.

I’ve witnessed and participated in the Human Rights Logo competition which claims to have gathered over 15,000 entries. As sincere as some of the submissions were, many other submitters simply gamed the system, “borrowed” ideas, or used the forum to express their negative world views.

Months of infighting, self-serving critiques and non-sensical submissions yielded little in the way of innovative design. Crowdsourcing this task was probably not the best approach: it would appear that some entities decide to “crowdsource” without developing a system of checks and balances to get the most positive work out of their community.  Crowdsourcing does not work without real crowd management. 

"Where good ideas come from.... [Steve Johnson]"

The Co-creation Bandwagon is in town

Let’s just co-create everything. Open our arms to the community and embrace ideas from the masses. It may sound noble and courageous, but we need to be careful when inviting the "community" to participate in creative endeavors just because they can. The democratization of everything can lead to nothing: When you add up all the opposing opinions, similar positions and various ideas of individuals in a community it becomes a homogenizing force and can produce some very boring results. True co-creation takes a lot more effort than a simple invitation to participate and needs to be curated by those that have vision.

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!

A Mypitch home run and a fresh cup of Zoopa!

Check out what the creative crowd came up with on some rather challenging briefs from Osborne Vineyards, and The Week (through the crowdsource platforms MyPitch and Zoopa, respectively)

Osborne

the-week-contest-winners

Would you let a focus group design your ad campaign?

Of course not, but you would listen to them. With at least one ear open. Too many opinions will eventually make any idea impotent. Collaborative discussion on CS platforms don’t really seem to actually improve ideas. It’s hard enough taking real direction from some one you trust and have an analog relationship with. The comment forums are often reduced to a saccharine litany of “cool” “thanks” and “nice idea” and the usual thumbs up icon.

I think there are some  fascinating insights to be gleaned from even the most obscure solution offered. (note: the most obvious problem the novice open crowd has, is misunderstanding the nature of the brief or the “ask”)  This would be a great tool for ad agencies when they’re designing the brief – if there was a way to keep proprietary information hidden form the open crowd. (competitors lurk there!) Running mock contests (with full disclosure and real prizes) might be a way around the sensitive information issue. And I actually believe some brands who offer briefs on crowdsource platforms, knowingly omit pertinent data to protect the brand. A bit of handicap for the community trying to create a viable solution for them!

Who does the crowd really work for? (more thoughts on what drives the crowd)

Note: in virtually ever case my posts refer to The open crowd on CS platforms that invite innovation, visual content, advertising and design solutions.

The open crowd - free range crowd? - is populated essentially by non-experts. And in that sense you'd think an expert in the crowd could clean up and win contest after contest. (If you're an expert playing in the crowd let me know about your experiences!)

I've witnessed many winning solutions that are clearly off-brief. (And heavily dissed in the forums by livid community members) The winning solution providers are earnest and sincere in their efforts and often show some extraordinary creativity. Getting off-brief is easy. That's were crowd managers and brand keepers should be stepping up. Hard to do with 1500+ crowd members. We still have account execs and creative directors in the trad agencies that struggle with the task too. And the less precise the brief the harder the task,

Filling all the media channels available to any brand with new content via a regular agency would be cost-prohibitive.

So here come the crowds.

But many of the Cs's vids for brands are painful to watch, proving only how hard it is to actually create and tell a good story in 30 seconds. But the crowds still come and the brand still buys the stuff.

I would suggest that apart from participating in the contest, and reading the brief, no crowd members actually care that much about the brand. How can they? They relationship is not consumer-brand

What drives the crowd?

There seems to be a lot of optimism from crowd leaders and CS platforms suggesting that “brand love” is the motive force behind the crowd. If I drive a VW and I have a predilection for creative expression, then I’ll jump on the chance to participate in a contest that is led by VW. That may indeed describe a very small percentage of the crowd. And it may be especially true for the random, occasional housewife participant, but for the expert crowd or even the enthusiastic novices, human nature would suggest otherwise.

It’s not about the brand, it’s about the contest.

It’s about the size of the prize and most importantly it’s about the the quality of the brief. If the brief is convoluted, overly complex, unclear or just too broad you lose the crowd. Why participate when don’t have a clear idea of what the client is looking for. Even if it’s a “one off” everyone wants to win. Brands who try to determine what they want AFTER they see the 300 solutions is a good way to lose the crowd.

Discover eYeka...

Another crowdsourced community of creative solution providers: some big brands here with some meaty challenges and no logo design projects, thankfully. ( There are plenty of fine CS platforms for that end of the design spectrum).

What is the future of digital scents?

The bigger the brand the bigger the crowd?

Not always. I've witnessed thousands of entries for a non-existent "brand". I've seen almost 7,000 solution on one simple, but difficult brief. What gets so many people interested in participating? (I written on this topic before, and will continue to. It's worthy of more discussion I think). It's about the quality of the contest: is it inherently interesting; the prize; and if you're an "expert" how much down-time you have on your hands!

The crowd is not homogenous of course. Nor are the results. In fact, of the thousands of solutions in one particular contest ( I'll let you find it on your own!) I would suggest that over 50% are the same, or just variations on a theme. In this pool of creative there appear to be few experts and of the more professional solutions there are only a dozen or so that have real merit and are positioned thoughtfully with believable rationales.

All the same or different.

Experts and novices in the same crowd will give a wide ranges of solutions. If the contest is blind, there will be must less repetition. It's not that individuals will plagiarize on purpose, but sometimes seeing other solutions that they've actually thought about on their own tends to make people want to post it anyway. First come, first serve. Time stamps help. Traditionally, in an ad agency setting in the creative department, if you have a good idea it's best to blurt it out first!

Does individual ego and competitiveness drive innovation or does collaboration?

The Wisdom of the crowds

At first take, this sounds counter intuitive, if you think about it in the more traditional “crowd psychology/mentality” sense. It usually brings to mind destructive behaviour like looting or throwing around tomatoes or running with bulls…But are creative solutions more likely to develop when the crowd runs free? The idea of cross-pollination and the community building on each other’s ideas assumes that the ego of the individual is subservient to the crowd, that better ideas than yours are automatically seized upon and celebrated. Bear in mind I'm talking upon uncurated CS platforms.They may be experts or novices weighing in on your ideas. The more “likes” the more thumb’s up the better the idea? That’s possible. But I think common desires and preferences only maintain the status quo and do not disrupt it. If Innovation and big ideas lie somewhere in the disruption of the usual order of things, sharing, discussion, cross-pollination starts to fight against true innovation. Big, creative disruptive ideas can intimidate people. That’s a natural reaction. The crowd may in fact harbor big ideas, but in the light of public forums and galleries, they may not survive.

Respect your crowd.

Is a crowdworkers union the next thing?

They work tirelessly. They compete with hundreds of others. They're often never compensated, but hopefully learn and have fun working on some challenging briefs under tight deadlines. So keep the blogs and forums current. Have your clients reward the winners as quickly as possible and most importantly show the winning solution and tell them why it won.

300 vs 4

By definition, crowdsource platforms deal in numbers. Big numbers. Offering clients hundreds if not thousands of solutions for any given brief! Really! (Check out over 6000 logos and counting here - again I'm using the global initiative to find a symbol to represent "Human Rights Protection and Promotion" as an extreme example.)

Is it even possible to have more than a half dozen real, actionable ideas for any given brief? I suppose it depends on the brief's objective: is it a product innovation, YouTube vid content, logo, print ad?...etc. As an old school creative developer who stills works with writers and account people to solve creative briefs, we rarely come up with more than a dozen directions and very rarely present more than 3 to client. Peer review and even formal focus groups are very much part of that process too.

Choosing the right idea amongst several is a skill in itself. That's how creative directors do their job. How do you do it right when the numbers get so big? The danger is moving off brief towards something that may be very cool, but not the right thing to do for the brand.

What drives the crowd?

There seems to be a lot of optimism from crowd leaders and CS platforms suggesting that “brand love” is the motive force behind the crowd. If I drive a VW and I have a predilection for creative expression, then I’ll jump on the chance to participate in a contest that is led by VW. That may indeed describe a very small percentage of the crowd. And it may be especially true for the random, occasional housewife participant, but for the expert crowd or even the enthusiastic novices, human nature would suggest otherwise.

It’s not about the brand, it’s about the contest.

It’s about the size of the prize and most importantly it’s about the the quality of the brief. If the brief is convoluted, overly complex, unclear or just too broad you lose the crowd. Why participate when don’t have a clear idea of what the client is looking for. Even if it’s a “one off” everyone wants to win. Brands who try to determine what they want AFTER they see the 300 solutions is a good way to lose the crowd.

As a crowdsource company watcher and participant, it’s interesting to watch some clients change requirements mid-contest, just like they do in non-crowdsourced environments!

How to win a design contest.

(no, this is not the winning entry! )

Note: the task was to apply graphics to the existing trophy sculpture - it was presented to the crowd as a blank canvas.

I was trying to tell a story of community and "sharing" the win with my design concept. In light of what actually won, my approach was a little too pedestrian and predicable. So how do you win? Zig, when the crowd zags!

Chi Fong Leong, went beyond the typical boundaries of graphic design. He did not just apply graphics, he "implied emotion" with heat sensitive paint. (When anyone touches the trophy it retains their hand print for several minutes.) I would never have thought of it, and that's actually very exciting to me. In fact I've now learned something about my own creative process! Check out his out his cool work - here.

Roles for the creative community managers on crowdsourced platforms

(This is not a complete list of course. I've complied some of these thoughts based on personal experiences with un-curated crowdsourced sites calling for creative solutions to marketing and advertising challenges.)

Insight Mining:

-In depth review of all solutions: Looking past the execution to discover the creators true intention and how that might inform the client and provide real insight to their brand.

Crowd Control:

-Active role in maintenance of the forums: leading discussions, making requests and offering general guidance.

Feedback Generation:

-Assessing solutions based on client brief: This may come down to a simple checklist that both creators and community managers can see and use, before and during the development process.

Creative referee:

-Above and beyond offering feedback, the community manager must determine what solutions may have been compromised by other creators or may not be the sole intellectual property of the creator who offered the solution. Even if the contest is hidden or “blind” it would be valuable both the creator and client to restrict some solutions for upload until certain conditions are met.

Ideas without borders.

Thoughts on “human rights logo” crowdsourced project: post 1

We’re all tired of the “thinking outside the box” analogy. Besides being over used, it’s not actually a fair description of a successful thought process that leads to real, actionable ideas. You have to be able to think inside the box first. And by that I mean, address the problem/challenge head on and understand how a straight forward solution works in the first place. It’s just the first step. It won’t yield the sexiest solution nor the final one but it helps define the “box” which you’ll need to step out of eventually.

As of this date there are over 4000 logo ideas on the Human rights logo. Truly, ideas without borders, but also so many ideas that seem to ignore some fundamental questions about the purpose of the logo challenge. Adhering to graphic Design principles aren’t really important on this platform; it’s about pure ideas and iconography that transcend language. After perusing the solutions it becomes obvious how difficult this project really is. Trying to get lateral and avoid the clichés is a tremendous challenge. The predominate imagery is globe, stick figure human, equal sign and surprisingly the words “human rights” in English.

The first "in-the-box" question needs to be answered. What does it mean to be Human? It’s a tough question really, but the answer should point the way to a possible solution. (Full disclosure: I have posted an icon that tries to answer that question too.)

Looking for insights within the cognitive debris

100 brains on the same brief. How many solutions would be identical or similar? If you gave the brief to a selective crowd ( vetted professionals in a particular field) with the same cultural backgrounds. My guess: at least 50. The number would get smaller the less “selective” the crowd gets: choosing different participants from different disciplines. The problem is that you’ll get more cognitive debris: more ideas off brief and some just plainly off kilter. It’s unfair to expect a novice or the uninitiated to think like a professional in any particular field. But we’re free to ask and it’s free to participate. That’s one of the beautiful things about crowdsourcing.

Brilliant ideas may still be in the novice crowds. You just have to look harder. I’ll call this “insight mining” for now….

The dynamics of schooling fish, flocks of birds and crowds.

I’m not suggesting that the “crowds” participating in contests and competitions are like fish or bird, but the dynamics of schooling fish when a predator is present makes the crowd behave like an organic “whole”. Moving, swaying and constantly changing shape to keep the ranks closed to the predator.

This may not be the best analogy, but watch what happens when the client gives high marks to a particular solution. It’s not surprising that all the new solutions coming in start to look like the favorite, moving in the same direction. That’s good and bad. It may be good for the client but rough on the crowd. If you have the best new direction it’s hard for everyone else to ignore it, creeping in on your ground-breaking efforts. That’s were the “blind” contests come in. No one sees anyone else’s solutions during the life of the contest. But does this run counter to whole rationale of having a crowdsourced challenge in the first place?

Online forums and Crowds.

“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it….."

Ayn Rand

When the crowd speaks, who listens? It’s hard enough communicating a point of view face to face with a colleague. Now imagine posting a comment, critique, observation and then try to accommodate the rebuttal or counterpoint, or clarification. It’s cumbersome and frustrating.

Reasonable discussions and thoughtful threads are hard to maintain in a crowd forum where everyone has a vested interest in their own work and advancement.

What's the better way?

Selective Crowdsouring

To refer to crowds with an expertise in a particular field and harnessed for crowdsourced projects, the term that appears to be catching on is the "selective crowd". I think we should crowdsource for a better one! "Selective" sounds a little elitist. How about the "expert crowd"?

The creative crowd is everywhere.

Unintentional art ( or the found imagery of postering and “de-postering”)

It’s not real art, it’s just found imagery on fences and hydro poles that has elements of visual interest in it. The intention was first to inform via posters: announce a date and event, push a productor service, etc. Then there’s the struggle for the advertising real estate. Someone posts over an existing one, or tries to remove it and only succeeds in tearing it half off. And of course mother nature has a go at it too.

The result, unintentional crowdsourced art. Although calling it “art” may be a push. At the very least it’s visually interesting. (yes, I cheated a bit by improving the contrast via photoshop, but the elements are as-found.)

Tapping the crowd for their best holiday snaps.

Developing a multi-media campaign to promote tourism:

I turned to the on-line community in search of the most unique and relevant photographic imagery of the province, sorting through over 11,000 photos.

It seemed like a natural thing to do. When working on developing some concepts for New Brunswick Tourism, it occurred to me that some of the most spirited and passionate photography is on the harddrives of those that had already visited the province. You can't compare the technical quality of snap shots to the portfolios of professionals, but sometimes you can get exceptional storytelling and passion in them. You just have to look at a few thousand first!

(this campaign direction never went further, but the possibilities of using crowdsourced -- and compensated -- imagery are exciting)

Can you build a house for 300 bucks?

Well, somebody out there can. We just have to find that one brilliant idea. WIth over a billion brains online, imagine every one ( ok, at least 500, in the true crowdsource community) bringing their brand of thinking and concept "tools" to this task. Ideas from those in the building industry aside, I would be more interested in hearing from an arborist or dentist. What kind of solution would they come up with? There's a thought experiment in this notion that would be worth investigating. The old term is "lateral thinking". More on that later.

http://www.jovoto.com/contests/300house/ideas

What’s ego got to do with it? (and the death of the dog and pony show)

Creating ideas is certainly not the same as selling them. It's a lot harder for one thing.

In fact, in the crowdsourced world, you are encouraged NOT to put a spin on your presentation, especially if it’s a concept proposal that you’ve written. Concept statements are encouraged of course. In fact I think they should be mandatory and have a set of text fields that must be filled out before uploading. It forces the creators to focus on their idea in one sentence or two; it demands that you have a real idea and not just the hint of one. Too often creators will simply regurgitate the brief, describe the visuals or repeat their headline in place of a real concept statement.

The presentation in the analog world can too easily supercede the “quality” of an idea. No where to hide online. If your idea does not work, no amount of spin or bravado will sell it. Dog gone, pony dead.

(Note on visual for this post: it was a print ad that I did many years ago - that headline never ran of course)

Where do all the bad ideas go?

With the potential of producing massive amounts of ideas for virtually every type of human endeavor, what can we do with those solutions that just don’t work. The good stuff is the tip of the iceberg. The less useful stuff ( I will never dis the crowd, because… it’s a crowd!) or the “guano” ( what a cool word for bird feces!) must still be useful somehow. Re-cylced as it were.

We need to build an aggregating device that can find meaningful connections within all the missteps. I’m half serious about that last thought. I'll work on getting fully serious at some point.

The original image bank crowdsourced for their content with varying degrees of editing. You don’t need to be a professional illustrator to get your work into an image bank. And why not. Server size and bandwidth are not as much of an issue today. Of course not many will buy some badly rendered clip art, but getting it posted in the first place brings satisfaction to the creator. It’s all good, sort of. And even one sale puts money in the both pockets - creator and seller. The neat thing for the seller or content provider is that these tiny incremental sales for even average work may still add up to a substantial number. The crowds make it so.


It’s the age of self-syndication. I syndicate, therefore I am ( an artist, or something like that…)

When the crowd speaks who listens?

One day I’d like to compile the comments from anonymous readers of any major news article. It’s a microcosm of the world in terms of the extremes in thinking. But the lunatic fringe is over represented it seems. Or at least I hope it is. It’s a fascinating cross-section of hate, bile, ignorance and occasionally, genius.

Crowds votes for the best solution?

Not sure that ever works. And there are those who game the system too. Duping friends and acquaintances into participating in the vote. Genuine, lucid comments are rare as is unbiased voting. ( I base this on just a few contests I've been following, so it's a broad generalization, but it's also part of the way we are wired: support your friends even if they stink a little.)

Who actually reads the brief?

Even within a traditional agency structure the creatives are encouraged to read the brief dozens, if not hundreds of times. Read and re-read. The solution is in there somewhere, but only if it’s a good brief. Judging by the comments from the crowd, it’s astonishing how many individuals have not thoroughly read the brief. Or simply do not understand it.

Global briefs, local talent?

Communication / advertising design is inherently driven by culture and language. Big ideas are media and language neutral, but to begin a real dialogue with the consumer the execution of the idea needs local interpretation of language and image. “Google translate” does not really help here.

Gödel or google?

They both like math. What has this to do with crowds? It's all about numbers and networking in the end. For both sides. The crowd and the ones who harvests the output. The more contests a single creator gets involved in the better the odds of a payout. That's obvious. But the tendency for some, is just to focus on the competitions they have a background in, if the community is open, it is just as satisfying to participate less familiar territory. For example, I've engaged a friend of mine who's a natural when it comes to construction and material sourcing to participate in the $300 dollar house project (see post). The crowd can network for those who have expertise in a particular field, then join forces to participate in that contest. Like 1bigbrain!

The democratization of everything

How cool is that? There are problems of course. There needs to be some protection for the crowdsourced workers. Check out this podcast ( by David Alan Grier: A bill of Rights) for a good overview on the rights of the CS community http://bit.ly/jYGHzk from the http://dailycrowdsource.com

For the next generation of creatives and the current one.

Where can you find juicy multi-national, creative briefs from global brands?

A hot shop? Sure. Get your book together and try and get a job in one. No luck? Hit up the crowdsouring communities. If you’re persistent and talented you’ll at least get to work on some cool briefs, build your portfolio and even take home some big prize money.

For the more "mature" creatives who run their own careers ( read: freelance, out-sourced, downsized out or fired) it's a chance to stay current and mix it up with some emerging talent.

To Curate or not to curate.

Crowds can run wild when unchecked. They don’t necessarily generate the best solutions that way for either wacky or serious creative briefs. The Client Critique however can be painfully unhelpful. This is when seasoned creative professionals really miss the suits. I do like the “gated” community, where only professionals are allowed in after a portfolio review. I don’t like them if they don’t let me in though. (I’ve been let in so far, just so you know).

In the middle of the wild and woolly crowd is where the action is. With only professionals playing the game tends to be the same. A good brief will yield only a handful of truly remarkable solutions with a lot of repetition and similarities. In a mixed crowd you’ll likely see a wider range of thinking, with a lot of “missteps”; ideas way off brief, or not fully hatched.

The more you fiddle with the crowdsource agency and filter it’s output (from the crowd to the client) the more it starts to look like a traditional shop, except for the size of the creative department. Is this the right direction?

The crowd in the cloud

I like to buy winning lottery tickets.

And I really enjoy creating viral videos. This is a rant against the idea that you can create a "viral video". A minor, semantic point, but it's annoying to me. Clients are starting to ask for them. If you want a video to GO viral, then make sure your client is prepared to travel to the extreme edges of their brand landscape. Or just tell a story well, with a relevant plot twist. Then promote the crap out of it. In others words, come up with a big idea.

CSourcing for product/service ad vids produces a wild range of solutions. Most of which are wildly crappy. But that's not a bad thing and it's to be expected. Telling stories with video is hard work. Professionals have trouble with it. Of course there will be professionals in the crowd too. (More on this later) Watching the work of novices, amateurs and hobbyists is fascinating. There is talent in everyone, but not always for the thing they're actually doing: "great video, dude, but wouldn't you rather be a chef?"