Brands as diverse as Peperami, OXO, Doritos, Budweiser and Cadbury’s Wispa have leaned on the general public to come up with ideas for products and advertising, netting valuable PR coverage in the process.
The problem with crowd sourcing, says Dean Taylor, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore and Malaysia, is that this it is still a new frontier for most brands. “Clients are still scared of the process - of losing control. And most agencies still don’t properly understand it,” he says.
But now a new, more creatively-tuned variant of crowd sourcing is taking form and pushing its way into the mainstream, and it’s not half as scary for brands. Put simply, it is the taking creative talent from both inside an ad agency’s creative department and from outside sources to collaborate on a campaign.
Japan is one country in Asia where campaign collaboration is already prevalent. Take, for example, Creative Excellence Japan - the team within Coca-Cola that briefs, inspires and manages the many creative partners who come together to develop integrated marketing programmes. The team’s role is to find a big idea, bring it back inside the company and take responsibility for “exploding” this out across the multiple channels.
A strong example of this is Coke’s ‘Crush Eco’ campaign, which won the Platinum Award at the 2010 Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards.
“We brought together Hakuhodo for the advertising, Canadia for the VIS design, combined with our in-house design director Hide Matsunaga,” says David Elsworth, vice-president of Creative Excellence Japan. “We worked with Kimiko Woo to develop the art project created by Mark Jenkins, and an art film created for the Tokyo film festival was shot by an independent film maker working with Hakuhodo. For the music we collaborated with Sambo Master. Our role is really to find big ideas, then say how and who do we need to work with to make this as big as it can be?”
Damian Coren, COO for Leo Burnett Shanghai, and former MD for Red Lounge, says that a driving force in this process is technology. “Technology is really helping, as you can see who is out there. A market especially like China has a lot more creativity coming to the fore. It’s generally the leadership clients who are trying this process out - Nike, Coca-Cola and adidas. For example, Coke developed a very high-touch experiential piece for the Beijing Olympic Games. We found two guys in Brazil for them who developed a huge bottle for Coke’s ‘The Coca-Cola Giant Bottle’.”
The structure had over 330,000 LEDs wrapped around the classic Coca-Cola contour bottle shape and allowed interaction with people one-to-one via instant SMS, live video cast and mass interactive video through motion-detection technology. It generated US$60 million globally through media coverage.
Back in Japan, Beacon collaborated with an artist called Amuro Chan for a branding campaign for Vidal Sassoon titled ‘Fashion, music, Vidal Sassoon’. The marketing drive included TVCs created in collaboration with fashion designers, musicians and hairdressers. “Collaboration with different creative talent gives so much power to brands and takes products into areas it wouldn’t normally go,” says Nicolas Menat, president of Beacon in Japan. “Collaboration is the golden highway to reach consumers.”
Got a view?
Email kate.nicholson@media.asia
This article was originally published in the 22 April 2010 issue of Media.
Brands source collaborators instead of crowds
Crowd sourcing is a familiar concept. Throw your ad brief out into the digital ether and invite anyone and everyone to come up with a brilliant creative solution, in return for a one-off payment for the idea.
