Something happened to me on Sunday night that has not happened in a long time. I found myself standing in my lounge and shouting at 36” of flat screen TV. I actually found myself getting angry and wound up as I launched volley after volley of abuse at the TV screen.
The theory is that because so many consumers now have access to the means of producing creative or online content, anyone can produce an ad – so clients potentially have access to a limitless supply of ideas.
Ad agencies, the theory continues, have tried and tested ways of doing things, but crowd-sourcing can help unearth the kind of ideas that agencies just can’t have. Agencies are being founded on the back of this theory,
That’s the theory. In practice, a recent example is Pepperami’s call for consumer contributions for its latest campaign. Film an ad, send it in and you – YES YOU! – could win several thousand smackers if yours is the ad picked.
And what happened? Well, a couple of blokes from ad agencies won. Which means the client paid an ad agency, whose idea was to let other people have the idea, and the ideas they chose were created by people from ad agencies.
Why not just pay the agency to have ideas? Well, back to the theory: it suggests that the PR and consumer engagement created by these types of competitions is of way more value than a mere ad campaign alone.
It seems to me, however, that what Pepperami have ended up with is a good old-fashioned ad campaign. The only way the regular consumer has been ‘engaged’ is by entering a competition and losing – to agency creatives. Is that a good kind of ‘engagement’?
Personally, I think the responsibility of the agency is to have the idea that suits consumer involvement. Once that’s in place, regular consumers can bring it to life by making real contributions (perhaps in film, photography, art, whatever) that sit within an idea that was made for them.
That might make crowd-sourcing worth it for me.
December 16th, 2009
