Adrants: OMG! Newsflash! Agency Launches With New Model!
Ben Kunz
· 1 month ago
Steve, I'm a fan, but you missed this one by a mile. Crowdsourcing is often a more efficient business model for ad clients -- matching talent with projects at a lower cost. Laughing at it is a bit like laughing at Google in 2001 because it created an efficient auction for tiny text ads (look at those ads! crap!). Or newspaper editors snickering at bad HTML layouts of blogs five years ago (who will read that for news? crap!). Um. Right.
If you step over to CrowdSpring, where V&S is getting bids on its own logo, you'll see scores of design submissions, many bad ... and several quite excellent. If I were a client I'd very interested in an agency model that expanded choice for me, reduced my costs significantly, and yet provided some strategic management to pull it all together.
Sure, V&S launched with PR fanfare (um, it is advertising). But Chris Anderson has a point -- efficiencies online are driving margins out of every business and ad agencies are simply next in line. Billions of people are soon going to be walking around with cell phones and laptops with full production software. There's a lot of talent in those masses. A broker who matches the supply of talent with demand could certainly make some money by offering more choice at a lower cost.
There is a tendency within ad agencies to hold up noses at the thought that masses of people can do work as well as the elites we call us. Rather than scoff at more efficient competition (I think GM did that once back in the 1970s), it's wiser to keep an eye on them. Most businesses don't get tripped up by direct competitors; they get whacked by the market entrants who step in from the side.
Huh?
· 1 month ago
The interesting thing you didn't mention is that they're going to be ranking individual contributors. So if you're actually better than the rest of the crowd, you'll earn a higher ranking, get offered more projects, and make more on each project.
That at least helps eliminate some of the clusterfuckness of regular crowdsourcing.
Nathan
· 1 month ago
If they'd simply gone to Google, they'd have learnt that they aren't the first.
Dean
· 1 month ago
Yowza! Them's some harsh words. Am I a fan of the idea of crowdsourcing? No. Not in the least. But at least they're going to try something different. As much buzz and press there is about the imminent collapse of the traditional agency model, we should at least be a little lenient and maybe even sympathetic to those willing to stick their neck out and roll the dice. In the words of R.P. McMurphy "But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that."
Anthony Cerreta
· 1 month ago
Since you tend to get what you pay for, I'd be weary of buying ANY products from a company (or agency) who prefers quantity over quality.
Geo Parker the 4th
· 1 month ago
Crowdnozzles.
Michael Semer
· 1 month ago
Back in the old days, competencies HAD to be grouped to pool people with certain skills. Ergo, agencies with clustered skillsets. Or big car companies and steelmakers, etc. Big shops that try to keep it all under one roof are perpetuating a model that's good as dead, not because of any lack of talent among the people under that roof, but because too many big agencies breed clusterfuckery and passive-aggressive bureaucratic bullshit that denatures the work. And I'm saying that as a veteran of IPG and Omnicom, in past lives.
Is it any wonder the client looks to arouse direct connections with consumers, build a little buzz on the side, and (bonus!) put the screws to a service model that's been milking them for far too long? Look to the Silicon Valley development and manufacturing model, the 'smart network' of enfranchised stakeholders, not the vertically-integrated monstrosities it's supplanted, as just an intermediate step toward where marketing will end up: what we do sure as shit isn't as hard as that.
All Comments
If you step over to CrowdSpring, where V&S is getting bids on its own logo, you'll see scores of design submissions, many bad ... and several quite excellent. If I were a client I'd very interested in an agency model that expanded choice for me, reduced my costs significantly, and yet provided some strategic management to pull it all together.
Sure, V&S launched with PR fanfare (um, it is advertising). But Chris Anderson has a point -- efficiencies online are driving margins out of every business and ad agencies are simply next in line. Billions of people are soon going to be walking around with cell phones and laptops with full production software. There's a lot of talent in those masses. A broker who matches the supply of talent with demand could certainly make some money by offering more choice at a lower cost.
There is a tendency within ad agencies to hold up noses at the thought that masses of people can do work as well as the elites we call us. Rather than scoff at more efficient competition (I think GM did that once back in the 1970s), it's wiser to keep an eye on them. Most businesses don't get tripped up by direct competitors; they get whacked by the market entrants who step in from the side.
That at least helps eliminate some of the clusterfuckness of regular crowdsourcing.
Is it any wonder the client looks to arouse direct connections with consumers, build a little buzz on the side, and (bonus!) put the screws to a service model that's been milking them for far too long? Look to the Silicon Valley development and manufacturing model, the 'smart network' of enfranchised stakeholders, not the vertically-integrated monstrosities it's supplanted, as just an intermediate step toward where marketing will end up: what we do sure as shit isn't as hard as that.