10.04
Since James Suroweiski’s The Wisdom of Crowds hit the street a few years ago, the idea of crowdsourcing has taken off in the marketing world. Many companies have tried to glean low-cost creative using this technique. They wonder if they can use today’s new social media tools to get free creative ideas instead of using an expensive creative team. Why not get the collective ideas of a large, random group? Bob Garfield’s new book, The Chaos Scenario gives some recent examples of crowd failure.
When Toyota, Wachovia, L’Oreal and Sony took part in a viewer-created advertising contest, ”My God, were the entries awful!,” said Garfield. Another example of crowd failure was the VMware video contest. I believe the entire B2B agency industry breathed a collective sigh of relief when we saw the top 5 finalists’ submissions posted online. If those were the best, I’m afraid to see the others.
Although there are a few shining stars that get a lot of buzz (and scare the heck out of us agency types), most user-generated ad campaigns fail. Either the quality is poor, the messaging is off-target, or they don’t have the creative idea needed to capture attention.
What a relief! Perhaps my job is safe for another year. Maybe my 23+ years of painstaking writing practice, ongoing monitoring of twenty industries, and countless lessons from trial and error are worth something after all. Maybe they can not be replaced by a few keystrokes of a nameless group of random, unconnected creative want-to-be’s.
This shouldn’t be so shocking. After all, having tools only gets you so far. Word processing software doesn’t make you a best-selling author, and having the latest creative apps and internet tools don’t qualify you to create a good ad, video, web site or any other kind of campaign. Good content is the product of a lot of hard work and the collaboration of talented and experienced creative people.
Polling the crowd may be a great way to get the answer to a Trivial Pursuit (R) question or to measure public opinion, but not a good way to produce agency-quality content. As Paul Gillin puts it in his September column in BtoB magazine, Web collaboration by non-professionals can be “a time sink of uninspired noise.”
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True. People who only read the title of The Wisdom of Crowds assume that the mob is better at EVERYTHING. More often than not, the crowd is a moron. Look who tends to get elected…
You\’re right, getting users to generate ads is probably not the best idea. However, that does not mean social media is not relevant to business. Social media is a tool and tools need to be used for their purpose. The problem is that there are so many social media sites out there it can be hard to know how to use them.
Sites like Twitter and Facebook should be used to see what people are saying about your brand. If someone has a bad experience with your product of service they are going to let the world know, usually via facebook and twitter. When that happens you want to be there to respond, resolving the issue. Not only that, but thank people who are saying good things! Everyone loves recognition.