It’s come to this: Ad agencies, in a push to get hip with the kids, lower their price points, and produce better ideas, seem to be piling onto the crowdsourcing bandwagon. But can crowdsourcing produce anything more than mediocre work?
Evangelists for the trend say that crowdsourcing opens the competitive field, to talent that would otherwise go overlooked. Typically, you offer a prize, open the gates, and let the best idea win. You get more ideas, so some of them are bound to be good, right?
试图尝试的广告代理商列表正在增长：时代报告，伦敦的Bartle Bogle Hegarty与TalentHouse;一些克里斯平校友开始胜利者;there’s also众春and天才火箭。地狱，甚至还有本地电动机，，，，试图使用数千名设计师创建模块化汽车。
您会看到为什么AD-Pros会讨厌这个想法：这些竞赛通常不会补偿所有参与者。例如，当克里斯平试图为brammo汇集徽标时，它炸毁了他们的脸，全面设计师起义。
Most of these new crowdsourcing ventures think they have a way around this. Genius Roket, for example, is introducing something called Genius Rocket Select. The idea is to raise the award pots, and preselect the participants in a given pitch. That way, everyone can get paid. The rewards will rise as entrants make it to successive rounds. Winners might get something on the order of $15,000.
But can you really get great work this way? Isn’t crowdsourcing just a low-cost route for those who simply can’t afford an agency, and an outlet for those without the chops to win big accounts? There’s definitely a market for that–but in that case, crowdsourcing is less about overturning the current ad-agency model, and more about serving clients overlooked by the system. I mean, do you really think that Nike is going to going to get their next great idea for $15,000? Isn’t crowdsourcing always geared to a low-end buyer?
天才火箭的首席执行官马克·沃尔什（Mark Walsh）说，他“强烈地不同意”这一前提。他指出，Genius Rocket的游泳池包括许多校友和名牌代理商的员工。他还认为，前期手工挑选和更高的支出比普通的简·众包（通常到过非常mediocre）。
（众包支持者喜欢指出Doritos的成功
超级碗广告。但是，这一过程的新颖性是主要吸引力。如果这
您的广告代理商以一百万美元的价格给了您，您会开除它们。
在克里斯平的众包比赛中Brammo的徽标，您很难找到并非残酷的条目。获胜者看起来很专业，但最终形式也受到克里斯平的指导。众包如此之多。）
沃尔什（Walsh）确实触及了一个很好的观点：众包仅与参加的人一样好。如果聪明的人四处闲逛，通过众包比赛寻找工作，结果可能会很棒。也许有一天，当Ad-Agengency模型崩溃时，他们会会的。但是根据我的经验，他们没有。还没有。
我认识很多有才华的广告行业人士。他们都不必以这种方式找到客户。众包倡导者会反对有很多天才，他们只是没有机会，因为他们不住在纽约/伦敦/巴黎/洛杉矶。而且不要参加正确的聚会。但这就是顶级人才的事情：无论如何，他们倾向于找到一种通往顶级的方式。他们弄清楚如何建立正确的接触并攀登梯子。总体而言，这意味着要与合适的广告屋保持良好状态，而不是在所有不确定性的情况下在相对较低的比赛中潜伏。
Does anyone really think that crowdsourcing can produce the next iPhone? Probably not. Products and ideas like those are made possible by singular focus, and gobs of patience; it’s not having a ton of ideas that matters, it’s having the right idea and having the resources to invest in it. (And on that note, doesn’t Local Motors’s第一辆众群体汽车有点让你想起Simpsons情节，荷马·辛普森（Homer Simpson）设计了一辆带鳍的汽车，可以在水下驱动并有一个巨大的杯架？）
That said, the ultimate goal isn’t the iPhone–In Genius Rocket’s case, it’s simply to create viral videos, which are quirky enough to explode on their own, producing free Internet advertising.
因此，也许更合适的问题是：众包可以创建下一个键盘猫？正如沃尔什（Walsh）所说：“创建十个病毒视频，将它们扔在墙上，并希望进行60万次观看活动是代理商的意义。”
但这是人群的意义吗？即使您确实获得了60万次观看次数，谁说这些是您追求的客户？
如果这sort of small-bore crowdsourcing produces a vid with even 1/20th the views of“巧克力雨”，在不久的将来的任何时候，我都会吃帽子。