Advertising: Crowdsourcing Creativity For Competitive Advantage

The ad and PR industries are taking some of their own medicine. Perhaps having listened to their own client pitches about the value of social marketing, an insurgency of smaller creative ad shops have banded together to sell ideas and services, share the work and the profits.

It seems an idea whose time has come. While the big conglomerates control approximately 50% of the business, smaller firms have continuously hived off from the big ones, then been reacquired as the value of their concepts is recognized by clients. Given the industry's history of reconstituting itself in order to refresh its content and presentation, this should be easier than it has been in some other fields. However, there are also precedents in finance' pharma and other sectors where intelligence, creativity and sales ability are as important as scale. Whether the insurgent network hangs together or parts of it simply sell out to the highest bidder will be the next evolutionary step to watch. Sheila Shayon comments in Brand Channel:

"The clash of the agency Titans has come to a head, and the enemy is a group of small-to-medium sized creatives hungry for your business and more nimble than their iconic brethren — the big agencies that control at least 50% of the industry.

Blur Group, which bills itself (and clients) as a creative services exchange, has blurred the lines between Madison Avenue and client’s needs by creating a 10,000 strong network, or brokerage, for small and medium-sized ad and marketing agencies.

The up and comer was ranked by Forbes as third in its Top 25 Most Disruptive Companies list released in March, just behind Apple and Google.

Vetting its growing clout, GE’s healthcare unit used Blur for a video campaign. Briefs have come in from CNN, Harvey Nichols Group and Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. as Blur says it adds two new brand clients daily. No brief with a budget less than $1,000 is considered, and the largest so far was valued at $130,000. Blur takes a 20% percent commission on every deal.

It’s a battle over money, creative control, and power. “We are flattening out the creative services marketing space and giving it a much more rapid response and making it more cost effective,” Blur CEO Philip Letts told Bloomberg.

“We thought to provide a platform where small and medium-sized agencies could come together and get lots of the benefits of big agencies.”

These winds of change, blowing for years, shifted significantly in 2006 when a writer at Wired, Jeff Howe, gave it all a name and coined the phrase "crowdsourcing."

Two years later, Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy commented, "The very model of our industry is being called into question. The model today is no longer valid, no longer relevant…There is a power shift from master agency control of accounts to a more digitally empowered client wielding new partner and provider connections.”

Letts is fully aware he's rattling cages: “We know they are watching us and we know their innovation leaders are really interested in what we are doing…We want to disrupt the Madison Avenue model. A platform like this has been a long time coming.”

Not everyone's impressed, of course. WPP CEO Martin Sorrell sniffed to Bloomberg, “There’s new crowdsourcing happening all over the place. I think there’s disruption in the industry all the time."

The battle for brands, the future of social commerce will be fought more on Main Street than Madison Avenue — and now, in a virtual army.