The Death of the Advertising Industry: Part 2

In part 1 I talked about a guy who's out to convince clients that agencies have no value. Part 2 is about a client who's been convinced.

I came across this article in The Guardian recently. Unilever in the UK has dropped Lowe, their agency for 16 years for Peperami meat snacks. Happens all the time. What makes this interesting is that they've convinced themselves that they can get better work by crowdsourcing the creative.

"We believe Peperami is a brand that deserves radical creative solutions and are confident taking our brief out to thousands rather than a small team of creatives will provide us with the best possible idea and take our advertising to the next level," said the Peperami marketing manager, Noam Buchalter.

Their 'radical creative solution' uses the Idea Bounty website to source creative. They have put up $10k for the winning idea and opened it up to pretty much anyone with an email address. And agencies were up in arms about the Zappos cattle call.

In some ways I like the commodification of creativity. The very notion is a challenge to me. It makes me ask "am I really better at this than the uneducated, inexperienced chump next door?" Which is actually a pretty good question to ask every once in a while, because a lot of the time marketers are much too clever for their own good. Though I'd probably change my mind about it pretty quickly if I lost my steady paycheque and actually had to submit my creative to Idea Bounty and it's ilk just to pay the rent.

One of my clients has been crowdsourcing creative for over a decade. They run an annual tv commercial contest that's open to the public. They hold a huge, campy gala event where they screen the finalists announce the winners and drink a lot of beer. It's a lot of fun, with some pretty good ideas making the cut. However, my client will be the first to tell you that most of the submissions are junk. Poorly thought out, wildly off-brand, often off topic, sometimes in frighteningly poor taste. Most of it is not unlike what happens when you let a 24 year old CEO come up with the ad concepts.

I'm not too afraid for my job just yet.