Crowdsourcing creates consternation

Agency-client relationships are funny. Especially today. There's a built-in irony that makes agencies feel extremely vulnerable. Agencies care about clients who are good partners that are loyal, give freedom to do great work and pay them fairly. Clients are much more pragmatic - rightly so in this day and age. All they care about is getting ideas that will drive their business. And they don't care where it comes from. Which leads to the latest generator of agency agita...

Crowdsourcing. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's the process of bidding work out to the world and paying a set amount for the best idea. It's a little different than consumer-generated work in that brands aren't necessarily looking for fans to do the work. Brands are looking for more polished, less amateur thoughts. For smaller businesses who can't pay agencies to do the work, it makes sense. What's causing the stir, though, is when mega multinational brands and (God forbid) agencies throw a line in the water.

I give you Unilever and Crispin Porter Bogusky.

Unilever just fired their London agency (Lowe) in favor of crowdsourcing to market their Peperami snack brand. Think about that. Instead of trusting a professional services firm to do the work, they instead threw it out to the masses. While clearly this is (at least in part) a financially driven motive, I think it speaks more to the a) lack of good, business-changing ideas coming from the agency and b)precipitous, pressure-soaked position client side marketers find themselves in. While companies like Unilever and P&G are known for their internal research and insights processes, I still find it remarkable they didn't think highly enough of even Lowe's account planning team to let them play any part in the process.

Crispin, on the other hand, is known for taking risks. They elected to crowdsource logo work for Brammo, a maker of electric motorcycles. What's odd, though, is that a shop so passionate and particular about the ideas they deliver to clients is willing to open themselves up to the outside designs. Some would say this shows a willingness to swallow their pride. Honestly, I think they looked at situation as a low risk, high reward enterprise. For a pittance of $1,000, if they get great logo ideas, they've paid far less internally than the man hours they would have accrued and had to bill the client. If they don't get great stuff, they still have one of the world's top design shops as an internal resource. Either way, they get added publicity and maybe even great work on the cheap.

After seeing the results of many crowdsources experiments, I think designers should take heart that the winners often are less than stellar. I understand the devaluation arguments those in the design industry have. My answer is that this is a simple matter of economics. If there is someone somewhere (say, India or China) that is willing to design logos for $1,000 or less, there will be a market for crowdsourcing. And with the proliferation of small business and the "flattening" of the world as Thomas Friedman put it, the crowdsourcing labor supply is only growing.

The first example should scare the hell out of agencies that don't do great work. If you give your clients a reason to look elsewhere (anywhere) for solutions, they will. As an account guy or gal, you should know I don't see crowdsourcing being limited to creative. The same concept works work for account planning, social media, digital...the list goes on. All of your revenue streams are in jeopardy if you don't strive to have your teams consistently doing work that delivers positive results.

Bottom line, don't give your clients a chance to look elsewhere. Keep them wowed. Focus on your relationship and make sure you have a bead on when they are getting unhappy or (even worse because it's hard to pick up on) ambivalent about your shop's work.

Here's some links to a few crowdsourcing sites for reference...
http://www.crowdspring.com/
http://99designs.com/