Will Agencies Suffer Death by 1,000 Cuts Through Crowdsourcing?

I've been excited lately to see that the idea of crowdsourcing has caused such a stir. You know a paradigm is about to shift when lines start getting drawn in the sand. When I was writing about co-creation in Beyond the Brand back in 2003 I couldn’t even imagine how the open source movement would radically change so many businesses.

Currently, a lot of emotion surrounds the subject especially in the marketing, advertising and product design worlds. Below are a few of the things I’ve been hearing lately with some of my thoughts on each.

1. Spec Work is Bad - I'm not sure I fully understand all of the hot feelings about the "spec work" issue. That's a bridge that other industries, like photography, have already crossed. Sure, there are lots of photographers that still get hired to do photo shoots. But, today the market is becoming dominated by amateur willing to do work on spec and put it up on stock photography sites like iStockPhoto.  Other creative businesses will follow. A good friend and respected graphic artist told me a few days ago that the only people that seem to be offended by the idea of spec work are mediocre at their jobs. His point is that he uses contests, like those run on Crowdspring, as a way to keep sharp. It's not a substitute for the work he does for his clients but it’s a fun place to play around. Plus, he reminded me that does a lot of spec work in the pitch process.

2. It’s Unethical – While this is closely tied to the first point, I can’t quite figure this out. Is the act of soliciting ideas from the general population unethical? Are the sites that have been set-up for contest-based collaboration unethical? Are the people participating on those sites unethical? It feels to me this idea is being promoted by folks who’ve already made it in their respective fields. It’s a bit of “Close the door behind us, and don’t let anyone else in” attitude.

2. It's Only Freelance – Yep. I agree. But, if you’re a very talented and live in a place like Perth, Australia, and want to participate in pushing their work to a global audience, how do they do it without moving? While crowdsourcing is freelance it unshackles the need to be in a certain place in order to participate in the design and advertising industries. Creativity grows as people connect and participate in a deeper dialogue. It doesn’t matter if it’s digitally or physically.

3. Work Will Suffer Because Clients Don’t Know Good Work - Sorry to be harsh but they’re the customer.  If they want to pay for bad work, so be it. It’s hard to find good clients that buy good work. That’s what everyone wants.

4. It Will Only Work for Small Stuff Like Logos – With any emerging field the smallest tasks are the ones that are replaced first. Sooner or later, the tasks become more complicated. Watching the projects posted on Innocentive things are trending this way. Also, as more clients start using crowdsourcing and trust the results they’ll be willing to experiment with more complicated assignments. The shift will accelerate when crowdsourcing starts being used as a source of creative material that is shaped by creative directors and delivered to clients as part of a larger strategic platform.

The big question is how much will it affect the marketing, advertising and product design businesses. Like it or not, it will usher in radical changes.  I started my career as a journalist and have always been fascinated by the arrogance of my fellow journalists as the looked down upon lowly bloggers. All kinds of arguments were made about how blogging would never effect the fourth establishment. Yet, look around. While newspapers stuck their heads in the sand the world changed. Instead of engaging the crowd to participate they allowed an industry to start and grow without them. Now, as journalists wake up from their delusions of grandeur they have found out they’re too late.

The bottom line is that great ideas come form everywhere.

The only question is, will agencies wake up from our own delusions or will they suffer the same fate as their print media brethren?

I hope this provides you with some food for thought. I’d love to hear what you think.

Comments

[Darrell Whitelaw]

i'm going to use this as my forum to vent. the issues with crowdspring are largely the same issues i had when apple released the imac and everyone thought they were a graphic designer. there is a piece of design that is largely based on strategy and making what works for the client, not just what looks cool. i make designs that function and have a purpose, which leaves me little to be afraid of here.

sites like crowdspring make it so anyone can download a few house industries fonts off a torrent site, vectorize some stock photo pieces and throw together a snazzy looking logo. and companies are excited because they are getting their "brandmark" for under $500 most times.

what these companies are going to come to regret is that there is NO STRATEGY behind that logo, its just made to look pretty, there was no research done, no testing, no thought about whether pantone 637C is going to make people want to eat a veggie burger or bathe in a salt bath, it's imagery made to LOOK good with no thought about how it performs.

eventually the buyers are going to realize whether it be 1 month or 10 years that they do not have lasting representation of their company, but a fad, an all over print sweatshirt or a pair of bell bottoms for the marketing world.

to open the market to betty homemaker designers is no threat to me personally, honestly you can HAVE those clients, i dont want them anyway. besides, have you seen what these people try to pass off as briefs on crowdspring? if you asked me to make an identity for you and gave me less than a paragraph of fluff about the sheer basics of what you do i'd laugh.

real companies with real business plans and real direction for their corporate timeline will never turn to herd creation for their communications, they'll ask for input and get ideas from their CUSTOMER, but not from a gaggle of designers looking to bang out a logo in 50 minutes. (case in point BBH labs had 45 entries in 48 hours, i make alot of logos, and it takes me 48 hours just to get the research done and start sketching ideas, i cant believe 45 people got hit with the BIG IDEA in less than 2 days)

sites like crowdspring will be a flash in the pan, it was the same story with elance.com years ago. it separates the chaff clients.

im sure i'll regret this post one day, but hopefully by then a real life doc brown will invent a time traveling delorean to come back in time and prevent me from writing.

[Tony Santos]

This is just an extension of the elance (and craigslist and whatever other gig sites you can think of) debate. It comes down to the comoditization of our industry, and frankly most of us designer types have no one to blame but ourselves. We haven't done enough to educate our clients and their companies what it actually is we do, they just think we make "pretty things", the phrase "just make it pretty" still makes me shutter every time I hear it. As Darrell mentioned above, this doesn't effect a lot of us who understand what it is we really do and have clients who understand that we're not just Photoshop monkies drawing pictures all day. Good design, the kind you pay hundreds of dollars an hour for, has lots of research and strategic thinking behind the "pretty pictures" that may be the end result. Companies that don't see the value in that will move with this trend, get the results they've paid for and then come back. Or they'll drop another $500 and see what the net has to offer them the 2nd and 3rd and 50th time around. This being said I agree 100% that good ideas can come from anywhere, but a good idea isn't what you get when you hire a designer/design studio/agency, when you hire us "pros" you're getting hours of thinking, research and testing backed by years of experience to turn that good idea into a polished idea. It's the difference between coal and diamond, crude oil and gasoline. I think the future of crowd sourcing is a place to find good ideas to pass on to the refiners, ideas that consumers (the ultimate judge of how good an idea really is in this biz, not the person making or paying for that idea) can really relate to.

While big journalism was brought down by the blogger, big visual communications won't be brought down by the crowd sourced designers, it will be brought down by the small, agile shops of pros using resources like crowd sourcing to find ideas with traction and then polish them into something great.

[Tate Linden]

It's wonderful to see an industry insider addressing the real issues. Crowdsourcing can be viable. Every issue/complaint raised can be addressed with creative problem solving. Don't trust the client to choose the best design? Then hire a creative director to manage the project. Don't like spec work? Then have funds set aside to compensate designers whose designs don't get selected but show at least some merit.

My firm is actively moving to embrace crowdsourcing as way to serve our smallest clients while still offering them the same great strategic services we sell to our multi-billion dollar clients. We pay the top group of crowdsource-designers from a 'side pot' of money to encourage top-level participation, and are considering implementing a policy where if we invite a designer to participate we will pay them if they put forth even a cursory effort on the project. We also provide the aforementioned creative director to help improve submitted designs and to guide the client toward the strongest concepts.

The only real rant I have about crowdsourcing is that most of the providers still can't see the big picture and don't understand how much more power there is in the concept. There is so much more that could be done with constructive evaluation, teaming, creative incentives & payments, and the like. We use crowdSPRING right now because it is the best of what is around, but the best is still only about 20% of what the industry will become in the next decade.

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on the topic, John. You are expressing many of the thoughts we've had at my firm, but doing so far more eloquently then we have thus far.

[jojo]

I blame the creative community for participating in Crowdsourcing as much as the petty clients who are trying to get work for nothing.

Crowdsourcing actually diminishes great ideas because it puts very little value to them.

[Alex Morrison]

John,

I agree with most of your post, but want to throw out two thoughts as to why I don't think crowd-sourcing will ever completely replace the agency model.

1) While photography has "bridged the gap" and come to peace with the idea of spec work, I don't feel this is always a relevant analogy for all types of creative work. With photography, there's a tangible product that can be agreed to, or not. If a photo is on iStockPhoto and you like it, well, you just have to buy it and that's all there is to it. The same goes for logo treatments. But how would spec work for things like customized brand strategy and higher budget TV & web productions fare in the spec work model. First off, the IP challenges alone to posting anything other than a tangible deliverable (e.g. a photo) online for all to see are enough to dissuade most talented strategists from putting anything actionable for a brand in a public sphere. What's to stop a brand from taking the idea and "forgetting" where they got it from? Ideas, when it comes down to it, are easy to copy. The issues with higher budget productions are obvious as well. They're usually multiple-person undertakings and require a huge amount of commitment up front from all involved to agree that the thing being produced meets everyone's goals.

2) While I agree with the PREMISE that logo treatments and "smaller stuff" will just be the tip of a much larger crowdsourcing iceberg that includes larger-scale assignments, I seriously doubt most major corporations in America would share the type of insight with the "masses" that typically would inform a creative brief and go out under NDA. And even if they were willing, to communicate your strategy to the same consumers for whom you ultimately want to craft an effective message is a little backwards in nature, don't you think?

At any rate, I'm a big proponent of crowdsourcing, but I don't think there's any need to overstate its importance to agency and marketing culture. There are certain times where it can be outrageously effective (I also don't subscribe to the ethical issues), and there are certain instances where it's just not feasible for a whole host of complicated reasons.

As agencies and marketers, let's use it for what it's good at, check the egos at the door, and understand where we add essential value. And if, to your point above, you're too "mediocre" to feel comfortable with this new reality, well... then, the writing's probably on the wall for you anyway.

Thanks for the post.

[JAson Aiken]

Hi John,

Thoughtful post.

I think much of the anger surrounding the spec work debate is just that...an emotional response driven by the fear of change and uncertainty.

Make no mistake...I am sensitive to it...I am listening.

We at 99designs are working hard to continue to provide value to both our designers (over 30,000) and our clients (over 20,000 projects to date).

One statistic that is often over looked is: Approximately 50 percent of all projects on 99designs leads to follow on work for the designer outside of 99designs.

That is telling.

99designs can be a powerful marketing/lead generation tool for designers.

Bottom line...crowdsourcing sites like 99designs level the playing field thereby creating new opportunities on both the designer and the client side.

Cheers,
Jason Aiken
99designs

[TimB]

These sites commoditise the act of throwing visuals together in Photoshop. The end results lack any depth. Clients don't value it, they skip from pretty pic a to pretty pic z with no real understanding of what they want or need.
In any industry the cream rises to the top - These sites are only fit for the dregs. Question will always remain - do you want to be taken seriously in what you do? If you don't value it, why should anyone else?

[Alain Thys]

Hi John

In 1989 I wrote a paper in which I proposed to an executive at what was then DMB&B that he'd set up a global platform to issue briefings to creatives around the world. The best ideas could win and clients could benefit from the best possible thinking. I was declared as "mad".

In 1999 I tried again using the internet as a vehicle, now combining the idea of crowdsourced (before the word) creative with a Charles Schwab style buying environment for media (after all, as their job can be 95% automated, no one "needs" media-buyers). I was again declared as "mad".

In 2009, today, I guess I'm still mad, as I still believe that crowdsourced creativity is the future. Agencies that really deliver value beyond making things "look nice" and know how to leverage this creativity for the benefit of their clients, will thrive.

But after two decades of preaching in the desert, I have also learned that agency inertia is a pretty hard thing to be up against. So no, I think many will not wake up from their delusions.

But then again, maybe that way the quality of the work that eventually does reach the consumer, will go up again. After all, it is the year of Darwin.

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[Marc Rapp]

Here is what is most ridiculous and ironic about these debates; Business people believing that design communications or the commercial arts are a service offering independent from any other Business or service.

Interesting and inane.

The only person(s) at fault here are; The business people themselves, on both client and creator-side.

We've moved from creating value to the value of creativity.
And let's not over exemplify what it is being asked of young creatives–free work. Plane and simple.

Inevitably clients cheat themselves of effective communications that generally should be tailored to their respective ideas, products or services. Yet–some are willing to ask for free work, or even guess work. Neither of which, are quantifiable from a business perspective.

Everyone is fast, everyone can be cheap but everyone cannot be good. Especially when dealing with these two important considerations; 1) A client's unique idiosyncratic perspective or vision 2) What the market can bare or needs in order for the communication to be effective.

Guess work will not provide you with scalable communications or brand equity. And if you believe that design, writing, communications, interactive development ( or any service you're not capable of doing yourself ) is only a means to the end, I question the clarity of one's vision. And furthermore, one's understanding of the difference between art and communication design.

Art requires no explanation. Design communication is an explanation.

[Deacon Webster]

I think with all of this stuff that Chaos theory will come into play and ultimately render it useless. Right now the participants are limited but what happens when 10,000 people submit ideas for your campaign/logo or whatever? You need some way to sort the good from the bad because you can't possibly look at all especially if you need jobs done frequently. So you figure out a way to filter them and ultimately narrow it down to a few people you like, maybe develop a relationship with your best contributors over time and suddenly - you're working with an agency again. Twitter seems to be hurdling towards the same end in my estimation. What happens when all 1,200 people that you're following begin to post every thought that enters their brain? You can't actually follow them.

[@scottRcrawford]

Will today's design director be tomorrow's curator?

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