I sat at lunch with some very intelligent people talking about crowd sourcing a few weeks ago and that lunch has me thinking. The group was from Tongal, a combination creative community and project clearing house.
You need a commercial, but don't like what your agency is pitching... call Tongal. They are connected with thousands of creative folks with plenty of available time to tell your story. Just give them a creative brief and a budget and they will post a contest with prizes for the best ideas. Best idea wins the job.
The fact is that I run an in-house operation with a (better than I deserve) creative team. However, this option has me dreaming up concepts that are suited to the situation. For instance, with Tongal we could complete an execution in multiple, far-flung locations simultaneously. That's always been difficult with our set up. Problem solved. As smaller executions of video for web are integrated into the strategy, we could push them out as individual small scale projects to multiple community members instead of queuing the projects and delaying roll-out. Another problem solved.
The concept had me search for other applications. Architectural design (ArcBaazar), interior design (CoContest) just to name a couple of categories. Want to build a new house? There's an architect in Latvia just dying to whip up a set of plans for your mid-century modern revival home. ArcBazar.com will administer the contest. Looking to freshen up your living room? CoContest posts your project to designers with spare time... you get ideas.
The potential downside is upfront money. You have to have faith that the law of large numbers allows for at least one good idea from the multiple respondents, because you're paying a (discounted) price for the service before you even know who's providing it. But let's face it, you might not get what you paid for in the most traditional situation and your guaranteed to miss out on the adventure.
Here's to adventure!
