There are a lot of local rags, but the Austin American-Statesman isn’t one of them.  The paper got online early and is great for updating their content throughout the day.  No wonder they rank above major metros like Boston and St. Louis in terms of daily unique visitors/readers.

Like any mass paper (save maybe the NYT), The Statesman is never on the front lines of culture, but they give it a good effort.  Today, in their “Tech Monday” section, they outlined the growing trend that some of us are familiar with: crowdsourcing.

They gave a few of the regular examples like Threadless, which solicits designs from thousands of Internet users and then has them vote on which to manufacture, and InnoCentive, which links companies and scientists with the promise of rewards often worth tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for the best answer. 

One of my favorite Threadless designs:

One of the many bizarre InnoCentive case studies, per the Statesman:

“An anonymous company asked for a method to prevent one of its food preservatives from deteriorating and discoloring. Michael Leonard, a chemistry professor at Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, took two days to develop a way to tweak the molecules to prevent the preservative from breaking down. His solution won him $10,000.”

This got me thinking about the success crowdsourcing has in my chosen practice: advertising.  My hypothesis is that creativity can be outsourced, as shown through t-shirt designs and intellectual property, but to date no (good) example of a crowdsourced advertising agency exists.

It turns out I’m wrong.  There are at least two, although neither has gotten off the ground.

The first I came across was from a blog post on Crowdsourcing posted in the fall of last year.  The company mentioned was Holotof, the “creative department for the new millennium”.  The post reads:

Started by Robby Ralston, a longtime agency veteran in Lima, Peru, Holotof has a network of 900 advertising professionals who will take piecework that clients post on Holotof’s site. A few days ago Holotof posted its first pitch, worth $600 USD for whoever comes up with the best idea.

After reviewing their website and searching the web for more interest/buzz on the company, it became clear that it hasn’t taken off the ground.  Google News, Search, and Blog Search yielded nothing to speak of…they just fell of the map. 

I then continued my journey and came across Adcandy.  This agency has already closed and opened its doors, indicating that they aren’t getting much business at all.

I think the failure of the agencies can be summed up as such: these agencies sourced but didn’t read Wisdom of Crowds.  They missed a key point of Surowiecki’s arguement: crowdsousing (wisdom of crowds) is dangerous and often futile.   

Surowiecki noted that there are several situations in which the crowd produces very bad judgement.  He argues that in these situations the cognition and cooperation of a crowd fails because members of the crowd were given one of the following five factors to deal with:

1. Too homogenous - you must diversify
2. Too centralized - people working in a vacuum is not wise
3. Too divided - a community with no common ground falls apart
4. Too imitative - if choices are made in sequence you get an information cascade where it is more efficient to simply copy what has already been created
5. Too emotional - peer pressure, herd instinct, collective hysteria

In the case of crowdsourced advertising agencies, Adcandy fails to understand factor three.  The basis for this agency was that the public would be able to come up with great ads.  Unfortunately, the masses are divided, uneducated, and prone to herd mentality.  Sorry, masses, but that’s the breaks.  This is the reason InnoCentive has recruited scientists from the great universities of the world and I wasn’t offered a login and passcode.

Holotof recognized this and decided to take a different route by recruiting 900 folks from agencies all over the world.  They realized the general public couldn’t produce good work, so why not bring in some experts in creativity like InnoCentive brought in experts in R&D?

However, where Holotof is failing - in my opinion - is that they still don’t see the truth of factor three from Surowiecki’s list.  Although Holotof’s 900 may have basic skills in creativity, it is common knowledge that creatives work best in teams.  Unlike R&D folks that go into their caves and problem solve in search of a rational solution, the task of creating ads requires some level of centralization to produce the organic chemistry that is a creative “idea”.  This type of creativity is something the virtual, crowdsourced agency prohibits.  People can’t get together to throw ideas around, thus the agency fails.

So what this means to me - and what this could mean to the many advertisers in the world - is the bricks and mortar agency concept wins out against the virtual in this round.  In this age of the Internet - somewhere after Web 1.0 and nowhere near Web 3.0 - the tradition of getting really creative folks together to nourish creative thought trumps crowdsourcing.

Sprinkle in a generous helping of virtual reality and things could get interesting.  Until then, I’ll have to continue to come into work instead of working in my back yard in boxers and a wife beater.  Damn.

—————————————

Oh, and in my humble opinion, Threadless is suffering from factors one and four.  By factor one I mean that it is tailored for and driven by hipsters.  By factor four I mean that all the t-shirts look the same.  Or is this just the byproduct of postmodernism and the fact there is nothing new to uncover in the arts, only layers of previous artistic movements to inhibit?  Sorry, Threadless t-shirt designers.  I just had to pose that final question.