Is Idea Bounty our 'Myspace'?
There was all sorts of kerfuffles kicking off over on Amelia’s blog yesterday in response to her post on the whether “Crowdsourced Advertising can work”… the chief protaganists in the story are Idea Bounty and the Peparami brief that Unilever famously put on there…
You should go on over and have a read of all of the points of view that people contributed around the issue… it’s clearly one that, unsurprisingly, has niggled away at a fair few people.
My contributution wasn’t really to do with the ins and outs of how the crowdsourcing works in this form, who spots the best idea, asking people to create a derivation of existing agency work and all those sorts of things.
It was more of an overall thought, and thinking about where this trend might end up…
What we do know about digital information on t’internet is that
whenever things become digital, they lose ‘value’, no matter that they
cost the same to ‘produce’ as they did before.
Music tracks being a prime example, of course.
And if there’s a place where these newly digitised pieces of information can be gathered at almost no cost to the creator, that place will become swamped with stuff that just crosses that threshold of ‘good enough’.
Like Myspace, for instance. The home of a million ‘ok’ bands (mine and
yours included).
…so…
…do we run the risk of making the main thing our industry has to sell
(the ‘ideas’) into our equivalent of MP3s? Hosted in the idea
equivalent of Myspace?
Or does it not matter, because every advertising/media/digital agency could never monetise ‘the idea’ anyway, it was always about product/commission/build etc?
It’s been gnawing away at me for the last day or so too, so I thought I’d take the comment, put it on here, and see what you all think.
If we digitise the ‘ideas’ part of the industry, and create an open, democratic, myspace-esqe platform open to all ideas, will we indeed drive the ‘price’ of ideas down like MP3s did to music?
And what happens to ‘quality’?
When the process of submitting ideas is as quick and painless (and most importantly as CHEAP) as this, will it just encourage many environments around the internet to spring up and become ‘the home of OK ideas…’?
Or is it the turn of agencies, like record labels, to realise that the world has changed and the way that they once made their living isn’t as viable as it once was..?
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