This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Harness the creative mass of the crowd
Dell is doing it, Starbucks is doing it, and so are Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble -- even the CIA. But just when crowdsourcing became mainstream, two former employees of legendary ad shop Crispin Porter & Bogusky gave it another twist by launching Victors & Spoils (V&S) which, according to its website, is "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principles".
The V&S clients are the same marketing officers who usually hire top-notch ad and design agencies, but in this case the creative department is - you. By crowdsourcing its clients' "challenges" to amateur and professional creatives, V&S claims it provides businesses with "a better way to solve their marketing, advertising, and product-design problems".
Since its launch last October, the US-based company has worked with clients on a dozen projects, including everything from brand strategy work to digital tools, TV spots and industrial design.
V&S relies on a variety of crowdsourcing methods; for larger projects it uses crowdSPRING, 99designs, GeniusRocket and other platforms.
V&S co-founder and CEO John Winsor concedes that strong creative direction is required: "All of these platforms are good for different things, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of entries. And Sturgeon's Law -- that only 10 per cent of any creative output is good -- definitely applies. It still comes down to the strategic and creative direction to make sure the work produced by any crowd, either internal or external, pushes the work forward in the right direction to accomplish a client's objectives."
V&S also selects small groups of people from its own 500-strong "creative department", a global network to which professional creatives and strategists from across the world have signed up. People in this creative department have a ranking based on their reputation. Winsor describes a typical project: "We invite 50 to 100 folks to participate, selecting between six and 12 finalists to compete. In these cases, the finalists get a fee for participating. There's another fee for the winner." One of the advantages of these smaller, specialist teams is tighter control of client confidentiality, as well as the ability to take on more complex creative assignments.
Time will tell whether V&S is a sustainable business model for the creative industry, or just a bold one-time experiment. In any case, the company is living by its own principles; until recently, the first line of its website (below the modest "Welcome to Victors & Spoils. Let's change an industry") was: "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" The answer -- because V&S had crowdsourced its own website design, and was still waiting on the winning entry.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
