Democratic marketing ‘good for one-off ideas’
Advertising agencies believe crowdsourcing can be a valid way for a company to discover marketing ideas but warn there is a lot more effort involved in developing a fully integrated campaign with consistency and longevity.
Prompted by Unilever awarding $15,000 to the two winners of its crowdsourcing initiative for Peperami, Dye Holloway Murray creative director Dave Dye says: “It’s a perfectly valid route to go and people should be able to source however they want from wherever they want.”
Wieden & Kennedy managing director Neil Christie says: “Great ideas can come from anywhere. Crowdsourcing provides an opportunity to reconsider the way we work and to shake things up. That’s generally a good thing for creativity.
However, Dye points out that the key to crowdsourcing working is the skill of the judge in picking the right idea. He adds that while people can come up with one-off ideas they cannot necessarily deliver them to a client “to order”.
Christie says: “What do clients risk losing? I guess it might be that they go for a one-off idea, for example a Superbowl spot rather than building cumulative equity over a longer period.”
Industry commentators also say that while Peperami might have generated plenty of PR with its competition, it can only really use crowdsourcing as a PR stunt once.
