desicreative.com

But consumers dont want to see ads!

interesting when u say consumers create the ads they want to see.. so u r projecting advertising as entertainment? as opposed to the device that will make a consumer want to buy a product? what do u think is the way to go (for advertising)?

IMO, considering we're living in a world of 'prosumers' who prefer playing a larger role in the development of products and services, it seems like it might be a good idea to hand over some authority to them.

What I'm wondering is this: what kind of quality do you foresee coming from the Indian market? I don't know what kind of ads the Indian prosumer can create...

We're on the same track here. Rather than it being about turning advertising into entertainment, you're talking about a world where regular people, like you and me, are more than capable of producing, distributing and consuming content. So, to answer both of your questions at the same time, the Indian consumer---or prosumer---is ready to add to the creative, and brand-building, messages out there. This is crowdsourcing at its core. So you, as a consumer, are creating something that will translate well to people who are like you.

As far as quality goes, we're a population of 1 billion. I've no doubt about the fact that we'll get some great content (along with some great quality as well) from you guys.

Interesting. But tell me, how much of brand building does a typical consumer understand? Today, hard core professionals work on brands and pump out targeted communications which are richly based on the brand's core essence. Do you think when a regular consumer creates an ad, she will be able to figure out the subtleties of core brand essence? Will she understand how and why Coke's advertising is different from Pepsi's, even though they pretty much look and taste the same? It can be a fun contest for all involved, but will it create effective brand building?

On the other hand for your model, maybe you need to rope in top notch creatives who understand brands, and source the work to them. But that is not, as you fashionable (oft used, and as oft misused, in today's parlance) put it as 'crowd sourcing'.

So we will have to live with random content?

i like the way this conversation is going. all of this is reminding me of old school advertising where ideas made sense because they had a strong rationale (brand essence) behind it. where restrictions were many but only because your creative had to sell something. today we crib when we have so many restrictions. we want to "think wild". we want to do art for the sake of art. we want to write long copy because we like reading our own writing. but what about the brand? oh ya! the brand! forgot about the didn't you! ok. rambling.

kikikikikiki, you are right. some of our biggest brands today, like Surf, Liril, etc were made when there are proper thinking on a brand.

the segmentation of an agency into a different 'Creative Shop', 'Branding and Planning Shop', 'Media Shop', 'Digital' etc has actually perhaps weakened the whole branding chain,...

I remember once sitting with a media person and a client servicing person (before a 'planner' was invented) and trying to jam on 'media innovations'.

now its so compartmentalised.

with sourcing the work out to the crowds isnt it going to be worse? it will be a huge success no doubt, because it is quiet the trend, and people and the media need to write something all the time, but will it create powerful brands? i doubt it. it may create fads and trends which shall pass perhaps as quickly as it started.

and the quality of the idea will never be consistent. but then who cares. this is the age of the trend.

I am, personally, a huge believer in crowdsourcing. So much so that I feel MS Word should already consider it a word, instead of dismissively underlining it in red. And there are a number of reasons for this.

1. Everyone’s got their limit. But the crowd doesn’t. Collectively, the ability of the crowd to provide ideas is nearly limitless because the crowd is fuelling itself. Here, you’re not relying on a one- or two-man team to think up ideas; you’re relying on a team that is limited only by the net-using population of the country.

2. People rely on inspiration to drive their ideating. I’m not talking about those who blatantly rip others’ ideas off, but those who get new ideas from old ideas. So while there are bound to be a number of half-baked ideas and ill-directed ideas, these too will give rise to great ideas that are well thought-out and refined to near-perfection.

3. In the case of BrandPotion, the crowd is made up of people from around our vast, diverse country. And from every stratum of society. So the ideas are going to be just as diverse as the people thinking them up and different ideas are going to affect individuals differently. The person whose idea is judged best is the one who’ll end up talking to more than just people who think like them, correct?

As for the point regarding this being pointless self-indulgence, there is a brief. This isn’t about showing someone a brand and saying: what do you think about this? There’s a very direct question, and the best answer will be the one that addresses the question, correct? In a way, you could say we’re giving more importance not to what you’re saying (because a brand knows what they want the answer to be) but how you’re saying it.

wow! i would be scared of sitting in car that was designed by crowdsourcing.

similarly I would be scared if sitting in the brand manager's chair who's brand's marketing/advertising/etc was crowdsourced.

it can be a trendy contesty thing to stir up awareness about a brand, but real life brand building?

will I get a crowdsourced heart surgeon? definitely so. does that mean brand management is just the talk of riffraff? definitely no.

the collective IQ of the corwd is quiet low. hence we have specialists.

for the sake of argument, and putting things into perspective, imagine crowdsourcing a surgeon? would u trust yourself in the hands of one, goofymanager? we need specialists when we are serious, right? shouldn't we be serious about advertising too? or, to come back to square one, is advertising only for entertainment?

true.

@ Desh Premi

Should Tata ever decide to crowdsource the designing of their next car, I’d like to believe they wouldn’t just choose something that looked like it might fit the role, but something that actually did work.

Take, for example, NetFlix’s crowdsourcing experiment, where the online movie rental company decided to invite everyone to better their existing movie recommendation system by 10 percent. There were a number of participants—all programmers, and qualified ones at that. Obviously, the winning team did better the system by a little over 10 percent, else, what would the point have been?

Crowdsourcing is not a crowd acting as one. It’s using the individual capacity of each member of the crowd towards a single goal. Therefore, your crowd never acts as a ‘crowd’, and you will never be applying the crowd’s intellect, but the intellects of a number of individuals on a single problem.

The idea, here, is to get more individual options, and also varied approaches to the same problem.

It’s obvious to us that most of the best entries in these competitions are bound to be from someone who has some sort of exposure to the industry. And it will be so in the start. But, perhaps, people will take a far deeper interest in these contests as they begin to understand the competition they’re up against, and find out what it takes to make a great advertisement.

And to answer your question, kikikikikiki, no advertising isn't for entertainment, though the best ads always end up being so.

so, lets say, to design a company's identity system, you would brief the world. then you may get X number of entries, and by trial and error and going the entries, you MAY get something.

that means you are getting something that is selected by subjective appeal, not objective reasoning, research and science.

again, I say, its good for contests and stuff, but serious stuff? no, I say.

how many people are seriously trained to understand a serious design communication like Corporate branding exercise (just an example). or if you say you will ONLY give the brief to trained people, then its not worth their while to be in such a highly speculative space. no one will give 100% focus as no one is sure they will win the business.

on the other hand, if ou hire ONE and ONLY ONE design/communication agency (after a round of pitches, studying their work, talking to them etc) and commission them to work on your communication problem, you can rest assured that they are a dedicated partner you have.

would you want dedicated support or mass hysteria?

goofymanager, sounds like u believe in getting good advertising material from the laws of probability and statistics? get a huge database of ideas and sift thru them and u r bound to get a great one?

well put, superman!