This past Wednesday at MIMA I had the opportunity to hear one of the founders of Victors and Spoils the world's first creative agency built on crowd sourcing principles. John Winsor is the CEO (twitter.com/jtwinsor)of this agency that debuted six months ago.
The Wikipedia definition of "crowd sourcing" is a nelogistic portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing" for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community through an open call.
Clearly this is a very different way to operate a marketing communications agency by tapping into a variety of sources even more so than "freelancing" that often happens across the industry.
John is a true entrepreneur and has started several businesses in his career but this is the most ambitious endeavor he has set out to establish. He gave several examples of the successes that they have had like the recent work for Dish Network that was recently written up in Ad Age (6/3/10).
The good things that he sees out of crowd sourcing are things like:
-Tapping into world class talent
-Fast
-No barriers
-No legacy issues
However, like any business model there has to be a down side and my guess is that there has to be some legal issues in what they are doing. What if one of the people that is working for them works on a competitive piece of business? How the heck does that work? What is the compensation model? How does the relationship work with the client?
There are lots of questions as to how crowd sourcing will expand. I believe there will be growth in this area but is this the answer for the next generation of ad agency? That is the big unknown. What do you think?
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