Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is defined by Merriam-Webster as the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.  When it comes to advertising, I would define it as allowing unknown parties outside the company to contribute to a marketing campaign and create advertisements on their own.

This is a great example of a commercial that was crowdsourced

To me it seems that there are several advantages to crowdsourcing ads.  The most obvious being that they are very cheap.  Where normally a company has to pay for an ad agency to produce an ad with a great deal of expensive equipment and processes, the company only has to pay for some way to reward the winning entry or if they do have to take on some of the costs of production they are surely minimal compared to the big bill from an ad agency.  It seems to me that another another aspect of crowdsourcing that makes it attractive would be the fresh ideas that are brought to the table.  When a company gives the public the opportunity to create an ad, they are opening up the process to such a huge pool of intellect that creativity will surely be in no short supply.  These fresh ideas can propel the ad campaign from a good one to a really great one.  The fact that people know that it was created by someone else who just wanted to do it rather than some big faceless ad agency could also help them to identify more with the brand and pay more attention.

In general I would say that the biggest critics of the new trend of crowdsourcing would be the ad agencies and more specifically the creatives within the ad agencies since companies that choose to crowdsourcing are choosing to do that rather than use the ad agency.  If everyone embraced crowdsourcing than I suspect that a great many ad agencies would find it difficult to stay afloat.  I think specifically it is the creatives within the ad agencies that dislike this trend the most.  I say this because it seems they are saying something along the lines of "I have x number of successful ad campaigns under my belt, I know how to do this well and you shouldn't trust amateurs with your brand because I know better than them what the best way to convey your message is."
Thanks for reading my post on crowdsourcing!