John Winsor

Victors & Spoils: 6 Weeks In

Wow. I can’t believe that Victors & Spoils is six weeks old this week. While that seems like such a short amount of time, it seems a lot longer to us. I guess that’s because of all of the great response we’ve received. It’s been truly amazing and humbling having received so many calls from the top marketers in the world, both clients and agencies, asking how we might work together. There are so many cool opportunities to experiment with and ways to bring more people into the fold when working on marketing and product innovation problems. We’ve also been humbled by the passion and abilities of the people who’ve been joining our creative department. Likewise, the comments and insights from everyone have been helpful as we build our model.

So, here we are six weeks in with a half dozen client projects complete and a lot more in the pipeline. Thanks to everyone for the dialogue, the support and the help. For now, our heads are down focusing on helping our clients solve business problems in new ways. As the pace settles down I’ll have lots more to write and talk about things. Look for that here. The Victors & Spoils site has evolved into more static site as we focus on the work. That said, we’d still love to have a dialogue with you on Twitter, @victorsnspoils and facebook.

Here’s to the future.

Join The Revolution

In honor of walking the walk, we’ve decided to put out a couple of staff-position opportunities to the crowd. Or at least the crowd that follows my blog. Specifically we’re looking for two extremely smart, digitally connected, hard working folks who want to help change the world here at Victors & Spoils. Here are the two positions we’re looking for currently:

Strategy Director
 
Account Director
 
These jobs are both full time and based in Boulder. If you’re interested, please visit www.victorsandspoils.com, and click on “Join the creative department.” Then click on “Join the crowd” at the bottom of that section and fill out the form - making sure to select either “Planner/Strategy” or “Account Management.” Then just let us know why you think you’d be the perfect fit for V&S and how you could help us start a revolution.

Victors & Spoils: The first 10 days

What an amazing first 10 days. There is so much good energy around the tectonic plates that are shifting. I’ve been inspired by the creatives that have reached out looking for new ways to apply their skills, the clients looking to find more inspiring and efficient ways to get talented and engaged people to work on solving their marketing and product design problems. I’ve also heard from smart people creating interesting platforms and new business models. And, from people a bit nervous about the changes that are happening around them.

While some worry about the evolution of work and the role community and collaboration plays, I’m pleasantly surprised by all of the people willing to roll up their sleeves and work on making new possibilities a reality.

Thanks for such amazing support and feedback. I appreciate all of it and look forward to the exploration ahead.

Welcome to Victors & Spoils

The news is out. Another adventure begins. I love the start of a new adventure. So much anticipation. So much excitement. It always comes down to the team. Standing at the beginning of this adventure, Victors & Spoils, is especially exciting with the amazing team that’s come together. My partners Evan Fry, Claudia Batten, Scott Beck, Chris Marks, Dana Vallely and you (That’s right, you. More on this later.) comprise a crew that I’ve always dreamed about having on a big adventure.

Victors & Spoils is the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. Our goal is to provide businesses with creative solutions to their marketing, advertising and product-design problems, by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.  

Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver.

It’s time for a new agency model. One built to address some of the biggest forces changing the face of business today. Radical transparency, the consumer’s demand to be more involved and a growing cost consciousness regarding clients’ budgets have all made crowdsourcing especially timely for today’s marketers. However, the crowdsourcing paradigm is a bit unruly for most clients. The number of possible solutions created and the effort to keep things on strategy for a brand can be overwhelming.

At the core of Victors & Spoils is our creative department. It’s not a typical creative department made up of art directors and copywriters but one in which everyone from art directors and copywriters to strategists and producers come together to solve a brand’s strategic problems. Our creative department is a global digital community where anyone who wants to participate can.  People will not only be rewarded by the solutions they develop both individually and as a group but also for participating in the community, itself, and helping others develop their skills and talent. In an effort to guide this participation, members of the creative department will earn a reputation ranking that will help determine a share of the revenue from each project.

As on any journey, things will change and develop new paths. I’ve been blown away already by how fast things are moving and the amazing excitement that clients have expressed. This is going to be a wild ride.

We look forward to figuring this new paradigm out with you.

What's Crowdsourcing Have to Do with It?

I enjoyed Dan Wood's recent Forbes article entitled, The Myth of Crowdsourcing. But, his argument is confusing. Here's the core of what he's saying:

But in the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

Hmmmm...

So, individuals innovate and groups don't. But what's that have to with crowdsourcing?

In Dan's article, you could easily substitute the word "company" with "crowd." Does Dan mean that companies can't innovate, as well? Can't Google innovate? Can't Pure Digital, the company that created the Flip Video camera, innovate?

Innovation is much more complicated than individuals innovate and groups can't. Time and time again, I've seen both. Ideas are always iterative. The idea that a singular virtuoso inventing something without any outside influence is naive.

Sir Issac Newton said it best:

"What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

What I do agree with in Dan's article is that without strong individual leadership, whether it's Linus Torvalds as the benevolent dictator of an open source community or Steve Jobs as a visionary corporate leader, a group needs a virtuoso to lead.

When you start to look at different kinds of groups, companies versus crowds, there are some interesting advantages that are beginning to emerge from crowds. First, most crowds are a meritocracy. They allow a virtuoso rise to the top without being held back by education, language, geography or title. Let the best idea win.

Yet, crowds still need to be directed. Ideas need to be edited and curated. Traditionally, it's what companies do well.

My hunch is that the future will be made up of hybrid groups. There will be small groups of highly talented editors and curators, that solicate ideas from larger virtual communities then combine the best ideas, shaping them into something truly amazing.

It's Not About The Crowd

I’m really excited for the conversation I’ll be having with Edward Boches in Boston entitled All About Crowdsourcing on the August 5th.  To prepare, I’ve been having lots of interesting conversations with folks on the subject. One thing that constantly surprises me is the amount of emotion around crowdsourcing. It’s made me reflect on what’s happening at a deeper level. It feels like I’ve seen this disruptive play before. On a long bike ride yesterday it came to me.

I started my first company in 1986. It was based on a radical paradigm shift and I was able to take advantage of it. I decided to buy a magazine, Rocky Mountain Running News to use it as the foundation to start a larger magazine entitled, Rocky Mountain Sports. The purchase was only possible because of a radical shift in technology. Instead of paying $35,000 for typesetting, annually, I was able to buy a Mac Plus, a 20MB hard drive and a laser writer for $23,000.  I was also able to get a beta version of Quark. Then, it was essentially a type setting program for macs. That seems surreal now, doesn’t it?

So, there I was trying to figure out how to typeset my magazine. It was trial by fire.  I was a complete amateur. While I didn’t need our typesetting house for the body copy of the magazine, I still used them for the occasional ad.

The first few issues turned out much better than I thought they would. But, you should have heard the professional typesetters. When they saw the issues they just laughed and talked about what awful kerning and leading the magazine had and that the choice of type was horrible. Every time we talked they said, “This amateur desktop publishing thing will never work. You’ll be back.”

We all know how the story ended.

My sense is that we are in the midst of another such revolution. This time, it’s all about connectivity. Now people can participate in culture by going on line. They don’t have to move to the right city or work for the right company to be involved. It doesn’t matter whether their an amateur or a professional, people now have the ability to work where they want, with whom they want and how they want. We’re evolving, as Eric Raymond so aptly put it, into a world ruled by the creative bazaar instead of the world of cathedrals that agencies have created.

You can call it crowdsourcing, co-creation or open source innovation, the crowd is here is to stay and will produce more and more creative content. The big questions are: How do you manage and inspire the crowd? How do you make meaning from all of their input? How do you build brands in such a noisy environment?

I hope you can help answer some of these questions with us either in person or via Twitter.

Join Us in Boston

Every day there seems to be more buzz about Crowdsourcing, co-creation and every other flavor of open innovation. More platforms seem to be popping up to join including, Crowdspring, Innocentive and Zoopas and at the same time more companies from Best Buy to Starbucks are jumping on the bandwagon by letting their customers in to help them create new products and marketing.

Where is it all going?

Come join Edward Boches and me at the in a conversation about crowdsourcing and co-creation at the Ad Club of Boston, August 5th. We'd also love to have you participate in the formation of the discussion guide. Edward has posted some great thoughts on his blog. Here are three things he suggested we talk about:

1.    To what degree will companies change their entire models if they are to take full advantage of the crowd as their source of ideas?  Will they cut employees and spend more money sourcing the crowd?  Will they attempt to become more competitive by paying less for content and products?  Will they be forced to work this way if their competitors do?

2.    Will all workers have to become entrepreneurs? What if you’re a designer and all of a sudden all design work is solicited this way?  Will you compete non-stop for opportunities?  Will you be able to get use to the unpredictability of work and income?  Will you resist even participating and urge others to do the same?

3.    How will we manage collaboration? It’s common to write software this way.  But what about projects or campaigns that call for everyone on the team to have a well-oiled working relationship, understanding and respecting each other’s roles, knowing how to seamlessly tap into institutional knowledge?  Will crowdsourcing require organizations to learn new ways of encouraging collaboration in an era when everything – idea, design, technology, production – is more connected than ever?

I'm sure you have some questions to add. Thanks for your help.

Crowdsourced Animation

Check out this great article in the New York Times today by Brooks Barnes entitled, An Animated Film is Created Through Internet Consensus. Here's a snippet:

Mass Animation is just one of several entertainment companies working the “crowdsourcing” angle. Perhaps the largest is Aniboom, which was founded in 2006 by the Israeli media mogul Uri Shinar and bills itself as a Web-based animation studio. Aniboom has built a global team of nearly 8,000 animators who have uploaded more than 13,000 clips into Aniboom’s library.

There is no doubt that animation and film is an area rip for innovation through crowdsourcing and co-creation. If you're not familiar with the mass animation project on Facebook here are the details of how the project ran:

In the end 57,000 people from 101 countries became “fans” of the Mass Animation page on Facebook and about 17,000 downloaded the software application, Mr. Landau said. The 51 winning animators hail from 17 countries, including Kazakhstan and Colombia. Eleven are women — the Hollywood animation mines are staffed almost entirely by men — and the group ranges in age from 14 to 48.

Kudos to my good friend Matt Jacobson from Facebook for putting this together. Matt get's the power of co-creation and mass collaboration and is sure to emerge as one of the leading voices in this paradigm shift. Likewise, Facebook is in a unique position to disrupt lots of traditional creative industries with it's community. There may be no need to form separate crowdsource communities such as crowdspring, 99 designs or even iStockphoto if Facebook can mobilize a large group of like-minded people in a certain direction to solve a problems from making animated shorts to supplying graphic design and photography.

What are the Best Crowdsourcing/Co-Creation Blogs?

I'm putting together a list of the best Crowdsourcing/Co-creation/Collaboration/Open Innovation blogs. Here's a start:

1. Clay Shirky
2. Jeff Howe
3. Frank Piller

What are some other good blogs that cover the area?

Thanks for the help.

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.