A pretty interesting discussion (some might even call it a food fight!) has sprung up on various blogs regarding the subject of "crowdsourcing" in the advertising/marketing agency business.

The spirited discussion was catalyzed by the launch of a new ad agency called Victors & Spoils, which has been trumpeting the following rather dubious claim (pulled directly from the V&S website): "The world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles."

Wow! That tagline certainly got a lot of industry tongues wagging. My favorite ad agency blogger, George Parker over at AdScam, was one of the cheerleaders of those negative tongue waggers. George dismissed V&S’s admittedly bombastic claims as just more agency BS. For the most part, I agree with George. Reasons why in a moment.

George and his loyal AdScammers had been saying the exact same thing about the similarly breathless prose and promises used to launch the Dell in-house ad agency Enfatico more than a year ago. Enfatico did not come even close to revolutionizing the ad industry, as it famously claimed it would do, and actually was a spectacular and hugely expensive failure for Sir Martin Sorrell and his WPP Group. Enfatico was effectively shut down a few months ago, with its remaining people and assets (such as they were) folded into WPP’s Y&R shop.

Back to V&S and its crowdsourcing claims. My immediate reaction to this new agency and its "revolutionary concept" was that Victors & Spoils was just another agency start-up engaging in a lot of empty bombast to generate publicity for the new firm. Fair enough. We all do a certain amount of that. Indeed, they did get a lot of publicity. V&C landed a major story in the NY Times ad column and also got high profile coverage on Ad Age and Adweek on their launch a few weeks ago.

Two of V&S’s three founding partners are veterans of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, a wildly successful ad agency that knows a thing or two about creating buzz. As such, their bloviating, self promoting credentials started off pretty strong.

But, the comments of the V&S partners (and their highly defensive and off putting blog posts) in the weeks following their big launch, have really antagonized (unnecessarily, IMO) a lot of people in the industry, who might otherwise have been more open to their new ideas. For these observers and blog commenters, the question is no longer whether crowdsourcing can ever really succeed in advertising, or if it is a good idea at all. That question has been pretty much obliterated by the arrogance of the V&S founders themselves.Bad move on V&S’s part.

Hey, a little humbleness and modesty (false though it may actually be) can go a long way. This is especially true when you are launching a self described new kind of ad agency in what is still a struggling economy.

The V&S brouhaha got me thinking some more about crowdsourcing (what has also been called the "wisdom of crowds" by Web 2.0 proponents and accolytes) and its utility in marketing. I consulted the excellent Wikipedia write up on the term, and found that it covers a lot more than I had been aware of.

As is its style, Wikipedia also highlighted some of the controversies about crowdsourcing — such as workers in the "crowd" not getting fairly compensated, quality control, rights management, confidentiality of information when working with a crowdsourced project, and others. Many of these problems go right to the heart of why many are questioning the use of crowdsourcing in the advertising business and the value proposition of the new Victors & Spoils agency.

But even those issues don’t automatically negate the possibilities of using crowdsourcing principles in advertising. That said, I am still dubious.

The fact is, advertising and marketing are not as easy as they seem. Just asking a bunch of people for ideas might appear to be a great idea, but it is one of those things that always looks better in conceptual form than in executional reality.

Coming up with great strategy, ideas and then creative implementation takes an alchemy of scientific research and analysis, intuitive thought, real collaboration, focused hard work, and a lot of editing and reworking that just cannot happen at the crowdsourced level. (As we all know, successful marketing also requires a bit of "voodoo" — the right combo of art and science.)

I have actually tried one of those Web based logo production shops, and the results were pretty bad (I was out $350 and lost about 10 days in the "bargain"). It sure sounded good to me in the abstract.  I had to scrap the crowdsourced logos and start over from scratch. Ultimately, I found no value in the process at all.

Victors & Spoils says that it is early days yet in terms of using crowdsourcing in marketing and advertising and that much experimentation will have to take place to evolve and fine tune the concept to fit our industry. That actually makes sense. However, they then got off on a wrong foot (in my view) by using a classic freelance "free for all" site (Crowdspring.com) to select their new agency logo. Apparently, more than a thousand designers submitted logos.

The winning design is actually not so bad, kind of interesting in a retro way. But the process was not crowdsourcing as I envision it (or as I would think V&S views it either). V&S’s mosh pit of a logo design experience also underscored all of the crowdsourcing negatives mentioned above.

One of the biggest negatives is the criticism that crowdsourcing exploits creative people (many of whom are struggling and out of work because of the terrible recession of the past year). I think there is a lot of truth in that. I also don’t know how you keep client information confidential when you are supposedly going out to a faceless or anonymous crowd to source creative ideas and execution. Most of my clients just would not accept that.

I am a big believer in a similar concept called "co-creation." That is where you collaborate very closely with your customers and other stakeholders to come up with new product ideas and enhancements, marketing ideas, innovations, etc. All of these new ideas and improvements were heretofore the province solely of the company’s internal resources. At its best, I think co-creation is the outside-in, egalitarian approach to marketing and innovation that crowdsourcing aspires to be, but just does not live up to. At least not yet.

We shall see if the wisdom of crowds ends up being a big idea in marketing, or just another flash in the pan for an industry that adores trendy ideas with catchy names.

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