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There was a once a time when global brands selected their marketing and advertising departments on their creative ability and trained them in the philosophy of business.  The most successful staff members were the ones with the most unique ideas which would push their brand to success.

This last sentence is still true these days, with one exception, the internet has allowed for the most successful and unique ideas to come from anybody around the world.  No longer must you work as a ‘staff member’ for a company or brand to have your creative ideas fulfilled, nowadays it’s as easy as entering an online competition or registering on a website.

Sharing brand ideas

Take video sharing specialist, Tongal, for example.  This website gained global attention last year when it entered in a US based initiative programme where “emerging” companies were asked to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services. This programme secured over 400 entries, and one of the winners was Tongal, who are now participating in a project for Brisk Tea.

The irony of this is that Tongal, itself, is a competition based website which allows anyone around the globe to enter their skills in creative thinking, filming, pitching and testing products.

Do brands need creatives?

It would seem that to work in the marketing department for a global brand in this day and age, you don’t need a creative bone in your body; you just need to know how to run a competition and recognise a great idea when you see one.

PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, recently launched a competition very similar to the one in the US which found Tongal. The project, called PepsiCo10, asks “emerging” companies to submit entries detailing their unique tools and services by mid-July 2011. The primary fields of interest include social networks, mobile marketing, location-based properties, digital video, gaming and “learning” platforms.

“PepsiCo10 will bring value to our business by ensuring that we are at the cutting edge of whatever digital and social media technology is out there,” Peter Charles, a PepsiCo marketing manager, said.

This movement to ‘hunt’ the globe for great creative ideas is gaining more and more popularity, and so it should. Essentially, everyone wins, the brand gets the creative ideas they want for a reasonable price (PepsiCo is offering £10,000 to the winner), the winners or top entries get recognition, make contacts and gain experience in how to pitch winning ideas and the public get to see the most cutting edge, unique and creative advertising and marketing campaigns from sources which otherwise, would probably have never surfaced.

Other brand contest sites

A leading agency in this ‘buy an idea’ movement is idea bounty, a website that that allows clients to ask the world for creative ideas in exchange for a reward, or Bounty. The clients review the submissions and select the best Idea as the Bounty winner. Clients can only use Ideas that they’ve paid a Bounty.

And what about Swagapalooza - turning it round this is new products pitching bloggers with large followings.  A product in search of an audience…. creative?  Innovative?  Worthwhile?

What does the marketer of the future DO?

Are we heading towards a future where a marketing departments primary job will be to select winners of competitions for creative ideas?  As bad as that sounds for all you marketers out there, I think the answer is probably even worse.  Why even have a marketing department for that task when people can submit their entries online and have the public vote for the creative idea they want to see actioned the most.

Be warned – The End is Nigh!

11 Crowdsourcing websites:

1. 99 Designs – graphic design
2. IdeaStorm - ideas
3. CrowdSpring – Graphic design
   
4. CrowdWorks – more for corporates
5. Brandstack – logos
6. InnoCentive – problem solving for businesses
7. Spudaroo – specialist for copy writing
8. AdHack – advertising experts who’ll write your next ad for you
9. Brainrack – a brainstorming site
10. NamingForce – to name your product
11. Clipik – video editing

Related articles

• Is spec work evil? (creativeagencysecrets.com)
  
• PepsiCo and Highland team up in hunt for ten new social media hits (telegraph.co.uk)
• 10 ways of crowdsourcing your needs or talent (the10most.com)
• Evil Genuis Finds Case Study in her Pepsi (inc.com)
• Mashable Teams With PepsiCo To Find Europe’s Most Promising Startups (mashable.com)

Newer examples of open collaboration have been written about and allied with the new-ish concept of “crowdsourcing” whereby an open group will collaborate to solve a problem or answer a question, and the business world has the possibility of a whole new way of working.

We’ve been hearing about new ways for businesses to collaborate and achieve the bonus of “a problem shared is a problem solved”.  Examples range from the Mechanical Turk micro-payments offered via Amazon.com for research services to IdeaBounty, a newly launched brand advertising idea aggregation tool and Innocentive launched way back in 1998 by three Eli Lilly scientists to encourage innovation.

It’s now an independent organisation and sells itself on three advantages

1. bigger breakthroughs
2. faster time to market
3. lower costs

All nicely compelling business case arguments for using the services – IF you can get over the hoarding principle and practice that is common in big business.

Wholly new ideas are pretty rare occurrences – but adaptations and developments of existing ideas and principles are quite common.  This is the basic principle that Innocentive encourages by leveraging expertise while working within the constraints of manufacturing, cost and decision-making criteria.  It sets out two groups of people “solvers” and “seekers” and has cunning sub-groups of seekers for not-for-profit organisations.

Recent challenges within the business & enterprise ‘pavilion’ include insulin delivery for third world countries and innovative male grooming brand communication ideas and in the engineering & design pavilion a “Self Cleaning Handle in a Wet/Soapy Environment”.  All creative challenges needing solutions.

Most participants in community projects like these worry about intellectual property protection for original ideas.  The best sites have strong protection for participants and so participants who offer solutions can be reassured that their good ideas that deliver results are rewarded financially and protected in law (until sold).  Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation is now funding some of the not-for-profit solution rewards.

In a nice innovation, there’s now an internal version of the Innocentive site called Innocentive@Work that can be set up behind a firewall and used much like the much-vaunted Japanese kaizen system which was promoted during the 1990s for continuous manufacturing improvement.  This may be helpful for large organisations where knowledge is siloed or rarely flows between offices and different workgroups.  But our view is that going wider to external groups may get better and faster solutions.

Reporting on the successes so far, Innocentive says the best solutions come to the challenges that are posed and phrased well.  No surprises there.  Good communications is important throughout the organisation and specifying research briefs is no exception.  One user, SCA reported that it got better Innocentive answers when posting problems as a general issue like how to make materials more absorptive than when they cited it in specific terms just for their organisation’s needs.

This would tend to imply that open-source solutions are best for open problems.  I wonder if the corollary is true that for internal problems, those who work in the organisation are best-placed to solve problems?  Would this be death to consultants if that was the case?