The digital hills are alive with the sound of 'crowdsourcing'. This west coast sounding buzzword describes the development of ideas or services by many people (often amateurs in collaboration) rather than by a few discrete experts. It is a cousin of the great 'open source' achievements such as the Linux operating system. A brilliant example is to be found in this Business Week innovation article about a a failing goldmining company that used the distributed expertise of the internet (and its many geologists) to find the hidden gold reserves in its old surveys.
In the UK , business writer Charles Leadbetter is a plausibe proponent of this kind of mass pro-am creativity (see his 'We Think' project here). In the world of advertising, the States has been quick to pick up on this trend with a number of clients bypassing agency structures to give their consumers direct access to their creative briefs. (see this post for some examples). What is most challenging about crowdsouring is defining the the areas of innovation and creativity for which it is most relevant and those where it is most irrlevant. The most compelling examples I have come across have come from fields of knowledge where the 'amateurs' are very very close indeed to the 'professionals':- software development, astrology and the like. Perhaps this is why the notion of crowdsourcing in advertising gets so many professionally creative peoples' backs up. It negates their craft and hard won expertise. Advertising creativity is a mixture of the iterative and the mutual (like crowdsourcing) and the utterly individual and instinctive (nothing like crowdsouring).
It seems that the only way that the crowdsourcing principle could really work for advertising would be either through changing the nature of the 'crowd' from which one 'sources' (making it smaller and more expert) or through the operations of chance (the infinite monkey theorem).
The first option sounds a bit like an agency, the second sounds a bit like a lottery.
Bain
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