How to Use Crowdsourcing in Advertising

Advertising is one of many business disciplines being disrupted by the ease of crowdsourcing input from a range of remote though specialist advisers and expert freelancers. This is largely, though not exclusively, in the areas of creative design and production. Ease of access to an on-demand pool of freelance talent is encouraging a growing number of major advertisers to amend, or end, their traditional relationships with advertising agencies in a bid to find new ways to handle the demands of “always on” digital marketing. Advertisers are trialling different ways of working, including how to use crowdsourcing in advertising.

Decentralising a process where the cream of the talent pool was previously focused in and around a few global hubs has also democratised it. More people can consider an advertising career without having to uproot and migrate to be able to do work for easily recognised brand name advertisers. The advertisers gain access to a larger number of professional creative designers and creators of advertising content – the words, visuals, videos, soundtracks, logos, whatever. They can get ideas and input from more diverse sources and cultural backgrounds, all from outside the “corporate mindset” of full time employees. The creative material itself can be written, recorded, shot, edited and finished at local production facilities and submitted online from anywhere that has internet access.

Let’s look at how some crowdsourcing platforms are contributing to the transition to various hybrid models of client and agency collaboration.

Crowdsourcing advertising content

In the traditional relationship, a company that wants to run advertising selects a creative agency, often through a competitive process, and enters into a mutually exclusive contract to work with them for a given period of time. As a general guideline, big spending advertisers will be more inclined to continue working this way for high value, strategic ‘big brand’ work of a broadcast advertising nature (i.e. the creative executions used in expensive paid-for media). They recognise many benefits of working with regular agency contacts who they know are familiar with their business and its products, and in whom they have developed a degree of trust and professional respect.

This type of advertising still tends to run in seasonal patterns, whereas digital advertising requires a 24/7 presence. It demands a continual, high volume of creative content, created by people with different skills, often produced at short notice on an on-demand basis. Fast turnaround is vital and advertisers are increasingly bringing this work in-house to speed up its delivery, and to remain closer to the user/sales data that it is responding to or meeting a requirement to fulfil.

More companies are taking their advertising in-house?

The traditional client/agency relationship therefore developed in order to handle different situations to those that advertisers now face every day. One solution is for advertisers to keep the big budget work with an agency, and bring the digital work in-house.

A September 2020 report from the World Federation of Advertisers states that 57% of multinational advertisers now have in-house creative teams, and a further 17% were thinking about it.

Recent examples of major UK advertisers to do this include the high street financial services provider Lloyds Banking Group, and food and clothing retailer Marks & Spencer. Lloyds Banking Group has created a 30-strong in-house team, called Beehive, to create up to 9,000 pieces of “low funnel work” consumer communications. M&S Food has been more radical, using an in-house management team of just six people that will partner with a range of creative talent – whether agencies or individuals – “from across the industry,” they said. This will include their big budget television commercials.

Crowdsourcing networks of freelance talent

Precisely how M&S will operate their in-house creative service has not been made public, though there are a growing number of platforms that showcase the talents of on-demand creative professionals they could turn to through using crowdsourcing in advertising.

One of the first was Fiverr, where advertisers can find examples of work provided by thousands of designers, choose one (or more) and brief them. They will find a blend of individuals just starting out who want to build a portfolio of work; established design and production studios who use freelancing platforms as part of their new business development programme; and established professionals who want to maintain a personal income stream while at the same time scale back from fulltime commitments.

For more here is the link https://crowdsourcingweek.com/blog/how-to-use-crowdsourcing-in-advertising/