In previous posts here I have talked about consumer-created ad content for brands, its relevance and its longevity. Crowdsourcing ideas is a way to get consumers involved with your brand, namely by having a vested interest in the communication of that brand. And in our Andy Warhol world of celebrity, most of us have entertained fantasies of becoming world famous, at least for a fleeting moment. When Doritos forks over one million dollars to a couple of guys who made a commercial, the stakes get much higher and the rewards much more tangible.
Which then brings us to Victors & Spoils, an ad agency built on the idea that the creative work can be crowdsourced. In one assignment emailed out by this company to prequalified entrants, you could make $500 by writing ten scripts for some national brand. That’s $50 a script! (TV ideas, good ones anyway, are hard to come up with. That price is completely undervaluing the effort.) If your work was selected for advancement, according to the email, they would offer $2000 for you to campaign out your ideas, under their direction. And if they ultimately produced your work, there was an additional $2500 in it for you. I don’t know about you, but those prices are not enticing enough to entice me to be a part of the crowd. Maybe it’s just an elaborate way for V&S to find viable talent in this business, and at the same time be able to churn a ton of ideas for their clients to look over. It might be a good model for keeping short term labor costs low, but for long term continuity for a brand and its marketing, it will likely prove hard to predict.

File this under “Gimmicks.”

The future didn’t exactly arrive like we thought it would when the first consumer-generated Super Bowl ad ran a few years ago. At the time, the industry creative community got a little nervous, thinking that their jobs were in long-term jeopardy at the hands of brainy folks with video equipment willing to work hard for free. Well, the economy and 2009 aside, most of us still have our jobs and consumers are still mostly uploading their ad attempts on You Tube.

The real exception to this is the Doritos brand. Since they began with their first consumer-created commercial in 2007, they have led the charge in using that kind of crowdsourcing to promote their products. And last month they took it even further when they released the first consumer-created Xbox game, “Doritos Dash of Destruction.”

But other brands, even those that have dabbled in it, have shied away from consumers as creators of brand messaging. The reason I suspect: Doritos owns the space. It is a part of their brand now. When you think “consumer-made ads” the word “Doritos” comes to mind. And since Doritos does it on the world’s largest advertising event, The Super Bowl, it would take millions of dollars for some other brand to grab that mind share away from them. It is much cheaper and easier to create your own space in a consumer’s mind than to usurp one.

Creatives everywhere are relieved.