The 6 degree limitation of Crowd Sourcing video production is failing

The 6 degree theory denotes that all people are six connections away from each other, which many of you may know led to the game “the six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, which had the objective of linking Kevin Bacon with any actor within 6 connections.

Crowd sourcing video production is not new, it’s been around for at least 10 years, as has the concept behind it, which largely has not changed. Filmmakers add their details to the crowd sourcing platform so they can make themselves available for video work, the platform offers them to their client base, they make a film for big brands - and big bucks - and everyone is happy.

If only it was that simple.

All platforms promote, as a selling point, how many filmmakers they have on their "books", usually a minimum of 20,000, going up to 500,000 in some cases.  Why is it then that most all crowd sourcing platforms stick to using the same filmmakers, usually not more than 100 in number? Surely, with such reach their degree of connection would be very high and therefore the number of filmmakers they'd work with would be high too?

The issue is, almost all filmmakers are inbound by nature – they found the video production platform, not the other way around – often times little is known about them, or they are just not of a standard that is required by the platform.

On the whole crowd sourcing video production platforms are as many as 6 degrees removed from their filmmakers, that’s a long, long way. 

However, this has just changed, or at least one company is changing it.

One of my investment companies have been working on some complex technology over the past year that has helped solve the problem of detachment as well as removing the need to rely on filmmakers that come to you (inbound) – which is not a model known to work that efficiently or effectively. 

So how does this new system work and who are these guys?

By using machine learning and AI technologies Curation Zone have analysed the work of over 1 million filmmakers and counting. What they have done is curate this into a platform of around 200,000 filmmakers that their algorithms have decided, based on a number of complex principles, are worthy of the name, filmmaker.

It didn't take 10 years to build a platform of filmmakers that almost nothing is known about, their AI systems found the very best ones by crunching a few billions numbers and now they know a vast amount about these filmmakers, much more than any incumbent crowd sourcing platform ever will.

Not only that but the technical wizzes at Curation Zone are matching filmmakers conceptually to brands based on the types of work they have done before, not just the categories they have worked in, their level of commercial experience and the awards they have won. What more would you want to enable making of the very best videos at a price that is always within budget; based on the breadth of filmmakers analysed.

What Curation Zone is doing is taking these degrees of separation out of video production, as every filmmaker their AI systems find and curate becomes 1st degree by default, and they do this with hundreds of thousands of filmmakers.  With crowd sourcing, people have to know the filmmakers, which is by no means a bad thing, but how many filmmakers can each curator really know to approach or recommend? Hence the reality of no more than 100 of their filmmakers being commissioned. Once filmmakers are 2 degrees removed, let alone 6, they are very far away from the source and as such not much can be known about them using human curation alone. 

Curation Zone is taking crowd sourcing to a level not yet seen, helping to transition the video production space from the restrictive confines of Mad Men to the perfect marriage with Math Men, that creatively works in partnership with the broadening advertising labyrinth that includes, not just Agencies but In-housing (Oliver); Consultancies (Deloitte); Publishers (NYTimes); and of course Facebook, YouTube and MIT and anywhere else that Math Men – and women - come from.

One of the greatest fears of the advertising industry is that the Math Men are taking over and driving creative decisions, to the detriment of creativity; Amazon trying create an AI system that can build adverts, is one extreme example, so it is happening, but it’s not what Curation Zone is doing, they are using technology as an enabler to creativity, not a destroyer of it. 

Now all brands can be just one degree removed from the very best filmmaking talent, whether that is established, new, awarded or whatever combination a brand might require.

Curation Zone is shaping the future of video production, to scale.