Creative Crowdsourcing: Better together

Millennials now trust consumer-generated content more than any other media, according to a study by global research company Ipsos. So, building a brand and developing content ‘with’ your audience instead of simply ‘for’ your audience, is a great way to keep this generation onside.

This is just one of the reasons why creative crowdsourcing has taken off in the past few years. And why, for advertisers, it presents an ideal solution in a digital world with an insatiable appetite for video content.

Despite its evolution and a strong interest from brands, open innovation is still a divisive subject within the advertising industry. In the past, creative crowdsourcing has been touted as the ‘end of the agency’ and, even today, its disruptive properties mean that I can sit in client meetings and feel the agency bristling across the table.

The truth, however, is that whilst crowdsourcing jobs may one day replace the recruitment agency and raising start-up funds may lessen the role of the bank manager, creative crowdsourcing is becoming an ever more-important cog in the brand/agency relationship and one that will keep the marketing wheels spinning for the future.

Once, it was enough to say that a brand’s agency no longer had the monopoly on good ideas. You simply had to look to YouTube to find talented individuals with access to creative tools and the ability to connect and share ideas. Brands started to ask themselves whether these fresh and engaged creative minds could offer something more authentic and at a cheaper price.

It spread insecurity that still resonates today but brands quickly realised that it’s not as simple as making a choice between one or the other - they need both. Brands need agency partners to design, plan and execute consistent brand strategies and integrated marketing activities across consumer touch points and markets, and for this you need to have experts on board.

But brands also need to be on the frontline with their consumer audiences, opening themselves up to user-generated video that is trusted, authentic and independent. So the challenge really became about how to manage a fruitful collaboration between the two, to deliver better results.

The answer came with the explosion of social channels. Almost overnight, the ‘one-size fits all’ strategy no longer worked and a TV advert couldn’t simply be repurposed for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Vine.

Creative crowdsourcing solves the challenge of generating multiple layers for content and it has to happen under the tight brand guidelines controlled by the agency.

Take the work we did for Visit Britain as an example. The tourism body’s agency produced a 60-second piece of content, which was beautifully put together and soundtracked by the song Feel the Love by the band Rudimental.

The advert [below] features a whole range of British landmarks, people, locations and experiences, including a Dartmouth Steam Train, the sound of a Wimbledon tennis crowd, the glamour of the Goring, the buzz at the LoveBox festival and the striking medieval fortification at Caerphilly Castle.

However, a desire to show Britain as a contemporary tourist destination by using the Rudimental soundtrack came at great expense and left the agency and brand with an amazing 60-second spot but one that was brimming with stories that desperately needed to be told in different formats and to different lengths.

The solution was to brief filmmakers to create their own stories out of the 15 subjects, featured in the Visit Britain ad [eg, Discover the Norfolk Coast, below]. The agency could safeguard the brand’s values by managing a tight brief and providing an asset pack, which in this case, even supplied clips used in the original so that contestants could focus on the look and feel of the creative.

The results saw a full range of premium content, telling stories on-brand and at a fraction of the cost it would have taken to commission them the traditional way.

Brands are under huge budgetary pressures working in a digital landscape that demand original, authentic and premium content. Visit Britain needed a 15-second version for Tumblr and will now be looking for a six-second version for Vine, a 30-second version for Facebook and a 15-second version for Instagram for their next project. Re-cutting the same creative just wouldn’t have cut the mustard.

We now live in a world where brands need agencies and both need an innovative way to add layers to campaign content. The demand for crowdsourced creative will continue to grow in line with technology and the consumption of video. The duty of the agency is to embrace the changing world before its clients. Crowdsourcing gives content new perspectives for fragmented audiences who can pick and choose what’s relevant for them and how to view it, delivering greater engagement and a higher return on marketing investment.