Crowdsourcing

A Message Brought to You By The Crowd

I've always believed that the field of advertising is especially fertile ground for crowdsourcing applications: the formats (short video snippets, one-page images, etc.) often lend themselves to amateur efforts and in many cases consumers have a much better sense of how to improve a brand's appeal than do Madison Ave executives. It goes without saying that I'm hardly the only one making this observation. Advertising was one of the first fields to put the crowd to work, and as such the models are reaching a degree of maturity we're not seeing in other fields. Advertising has received short shrift in this blog, an oversight I hope to correct starting now. Fair warning: Today's post runs long (which will hopefully compensate somewhat for my extended Thanksgiving break!)

The genesis of the term crowdsourcing lies in a discussion my editor Mark Robinson and I had about the Converse "Gallery" campaign, which now occupies a sort of mythic status as the grand-daddy of consumer-generated ad campaigns. Way back in the bygone age of August 2004, Converse gave its ad agency, Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, a difficult task: reinvent the iconic Chuck Taylor brand. BSS&P responded by placing ads in alternative weeklies soliciting 24-second spots from budding filmmakers and anyone else capable of wielding a camcorder. The shorts had to somehow convey a passion for Chuck Taylors, but that was it. You didn't even have to to show the shoe. Within three weeks the company had received 750 submissions, a number that has since climbed into the thousands. The best have run on TV, which has driven further interest in the campaign. While Converse won't comment on sales, it's parent company Nike experienced a 25 percent increase in sales in that financial quarter, a rise due in large part to the success of the Gallery campaign.

Apres Chuck, les Deluge
Never ones to scorn a ride on the bandwagon, advertisers didn't take long to mimic the Converse campaign. Companies from Sony to MasterCard to Toyota to Geico (the list goes on and on) have since solicited content, ideas and even final creative from users, and by April of this year even so conservative a brand as Chevrolet got in the action, asking consumers to create mash-ups about the Chevy Tahoe using provided video clips and music. The most popular of the resulting videos subverted the intent of the campaign, characterizing the Tahoe as a gas guzzling leviathan responsible for global warming, the quagmire in Iraq and highway fatalities. Oops. "At first, everyone assumed it was just another case of a big corporation not 'getting it,'" writes Wired writer Frank Rose in an article about the Tahoe campaign in this month's Wired. But gradually, the marketing community (and Tahoe's detractors) realized despite the viral backlash, the campaign was an unequivocal smash, driving vast amounts of traffic to Chevy's site and putting Tahoe on the lips of a whole new class of consumer. The new Tahoe started outselling it's counterpart at Ford – the Explorer – by a margin of 2 to 1.

Now the trend continues to gain momentum. Frito-Lay is bypassing its agency to solicit user-generated spots through Yahoo. The winning entry will debut during the Super Bowl. If there were any doubt before, user-generated advertising has arrived. Fast Company has even predicted "agency executive" to be among six jobs that won't exist in 2016. (This is overhyped hooey – creatives will simply have to exercise a different set of skills – but more on that some other time.)

Yet while an increasing number of clients are now utilizing crowd contributions in their branding efforts, very few agencies or start-ups have built a broad crowdsourcing application to use across the board. In other words, it's still being used on an ad hoc basis. I predict that's soon to change, and here are the harbingers:

• British ad firm TBWA/London's November debut of TBWA/Lab, or what it calls "The Big What Adventure." Professionals within the agency post various projects they're working on to get feedback and ideas from the user. Anyone can submit, and if TBWA uses an idea they'll pay for the privilege. (They'll also keep all the relevant intellectual property, but that's neither surprising nor unfair.) Here's why this is significant: TBWA is one of the largest global ad agencies. A small move by a big player has more serious implications than a big move by a small player (see below), if for no other reason than reach. Secondly, what TBWA/London has done is build a pipe through which ideas, videos and creative of all kinds can flow. It's not dependent on a single client's need. Additional analysis by one of my favorite advertising blogs, The Fruits of Imagination.

• The launch of Holotof, "the creative department of the new millennium." Started by Robby Ralston, a longtime agency veteran in Lima, Peru, Holotof has a network of 900 advertising professionals who will take piecework that clients post on Holotof's site. A few days ago Holotof posted its first pitch, worth $600 USD for whoever comes up with the best idea. (I might have recommended a bid system, a la Rent-a-Coder, but Robby has surely put a great deal of thought into the pricing structure.) How does Holotof work? Here's a lovely graph to answer the question (leave it to an ad creative to make great visuals):

Right now Holotof has one client offering $600 prize for ideas. Okay, so Holotof has a way to go before proving their model is the right one. But I like it a lot. It avoids the mistake I think a similar, and much older, crowd-agency called Adcandy has made including professionals in their network. I think the T-Shirt company Threadless (which I turn to again and again as a highly effective crowdsourcing model) shows that "best practice" in this regard is combined of a hybrid of professionals and amateurs. At any rate, I look forward to following the trend in the advertising field in general, and particularly the kind of experiment in which Holotof and TBWA/London are engaged.

Faces in the Crowd: Interview Series Part I

I've always said that crowdsourcing.com would be a group blog. Now I finally get to prove it. Shazz Mack (her nom de plume) has been corresponding with me since the launch of crowdsourcing.com. I recently persuaded her to contribute to the site. We agreed that it might be illuminating to conduct some Q&A's with people involved in various aspects of crowdsourcing. Shazz decided to interview Lise Gagné, a highly successful iStockPhoto.com photographer. I recommend the interview to all my readers, not just those following the effects of crowdsourcing models in the stock photography. Gagné's experience is revealing, not least because it shows the rapidly increasing economic potential in high-volume crowdsourcing models like iStockPhoto.com. Gagné also feels the microstock model offers advantages over the traditional stock agency route; fascinating given the disparity in pricing structure. At any rate, you'll all draw your own conclusions, and both Shazz and I hope to hear them in the comments section. Without further ado, I turn the blog over to Shazz ...

La vedette du stock
Meet Lise Gagné, the world’s first crowdsourcing photography star. With over 390,000 downloaded sales of her stock photographs in just 3 years, Québec photographer Lise Gagné has emerged as a global “stock star” in the world of crowdsourcing. What has made her so successful? According to Lise, it’s a mélange of passion, creativity, discipline and a very personal goal. (Interview and translation from original French by Shazz Mack)

A self-portrait, by Lise Gagné

What are the skills you apply to crowdsourcing?
I’m a digital stock photographer. And, as a former Web/multimedia designer, I also bring strong graphic design sensibilities and software skills to my work.

Which crowdsourcing organizations do you work with?
I’m an exclusive iStockphoto photographer and have worked with them since 2003.

Tell us a bit about your background.
I came to the world of stock photography after trying out a few different paths. I left school very early, at 14, and worked in boutiques and did some traveling. In my 20’s, I studied and worked in translation, [Lise is a francophone] but found it just wasn’t for me. So in 2000, at the age of 36, I went back to school again, this time for Web/multimedia at a local technical college (called a CEGEP in Quebec). I did really well and started at Web design shop. The digital photography “bug” bit me soon after that.

Describe what your workspace (static or mobile) looks like.
For a while I worked out of my apartment, and then I had a rented studio space for about a year. Today, I live in a downtown condo in Québec City with my partner, Louis Leblanc, and we work in a sun-filled loft studio that’s actually part of an old ice factory; there were many of these factories throughout Québec before the days of refrigeration. We just purchased the studio this year and are still getting settled. It’s a fantastic work space.

What other work to you do, if any?
I’m 100% focused on stock photography. I love it so much that I haven’t even felt the need to take a vacation for quite a while. All my trips are for stock-related events and visits. For example, I just went to the iStock event in Slovenia, which was great, and I’ve also gone to Las Vegas, Boston and New York for photo events.

Upcoming Events

I know it's short notice, but if anyone's going to be in Second Life in about, well, 29 minutes, please stop by Colonia Nova for a roundtable discussion about the use of crowdsourcing in the metaverse (don't call it a video game!), Second Life. The event is being hosted by Gwyneth Llewelyn and the Kuurian Expedition. Topic include community, the shifting nature of work and what companies owe their crowdsourcees. Or at least, that's the agenda I'd like to tackle.

Second Life is a near-perfect crowdsourcing model, and it's also more mature than many of the companies to have emerged over the last six months. As such, they comprise a petri dish of sorts, and are starting to wrestle with some of the thornier issues inherent in relying on a community to create your product. With big corporations like IBM, and well heck, Wired Magazine throwing up a shingles in the SL metaverse, how much control should the company cede to the community in guiding that growth? I don't know, but today's discussion certainly won't be short on opinions. Click here for the teleporting coordinates, aka SLURL)

Gannett Roundup: The Blogs, Part II

Jonathan Rothman at Web 2.0 Television wrote up a nice companion piece to my  "reaction round-up" from a few days ago. Includes a few choice excepts from Poynter's e-Media Tidbits, Editor & Publisher and the Brit media watcher, Press-Gazette. But don't believe me, check out Jonathan's post.

Q&A in Second Life: Crowdsourcing and Virtual Worlds

I want to take a brief break from Gannett coverage (I'm under slept, having stayed up half the night watching Montana returns roll in.) Last week I appeared in my first virtual Q&A, at a Wired event in our new Second Life digs. The topic, naturally, was crowdsourcing in general and how Linden Lab – the company behind SL – has used crowdsourcing to great advantage. It was great fun, and the audience asked several thoughtful questions, such as Mordant Kepler, who wondered whether minimum wage laws should apply in crowdsourcing. My reply, somewhat abbreviated:

I think there are policy frameworks that we haven't begun to work out. If I'm a turker in Bangladesh, what's my minimum wage? If it's in US dollars and the requesting company is incorporated here, I think the answer would be our minimum wage, but I'm not even sure you could enforce minimum wage on piecework like that, which explains why some people are -- rightfully -- worried about crowdsourcing's implications.

If that sounds like a long-winded way of saying, dunno, you're not far from the mark. In my defense, no one else knows either. But I think we're just seeing the start of this debate. At any rate, read all this and more on the Wired game blog. The beautiful thing about virtual public speaking is that it generates an automatic transcript.

Gannett's Crowdsourcing in Action

Never mind the debate over whether Gannett's plan will or will not work. The Cincinnati Enquirer has put up a page through which readers can report any voting problems occurring in their precincts. Twenty-five instances of irregularities have already emerged, each mapped out using an embedded Google Map on the Enquirer site. An Enquirer reporter dashed off this note about the effect: "Look at these citizen reports ..and breaking news amid….reporter and photog threatened with arrest….Congressman sent home to get proper i.d. Crowdsourcing rocks."

Gannett Roundup: The Blogs

There was far more commentary than I could begin to digest, but it seemed like a worthwhile project to try to build a compendium, however incomplete, of the more trenchant takes on Gannett's Seven Desk Plan. I've split reactions into pro and con, with the latter running after the jump. If I missed you, and I won't be surprised to hear that did, email me or, better yet, post a comment expressing your views.

• Dan Gillmor calls the Gannett initiative "truly remarkable," but adds the world-wise observation that, "no doubt, a major part of this initiative is to save money. Gannett is famously careful with its spending, to put it mildly." Gannett execs didn't discuss the "local information centers" in those terms, but I've no reason to think Gillmor's wrong, and many reasons – from my experiencing looking at other companies putting user-generated content/crowdsourcing models to work – that he's right.

• The most lengthy consideration came, unsurprisingly, from NewAssignment.Net, where longtime Washington Post editor Steve Fox offers an enthusiastic endorsement for the Fort Myers News-Press' experiment with distributed investigatory journalism. Fox also contributes some excellent historical context, recalling reactions amongst journalists to the launch of USA Today and how papers rushed pell-mell to put up Web sites in 1996.

• Slashdot asks if Gannett "successfully duplicate what online communities have been doing for years?" which naturally has fueled discussion on the site's ever-active forum boards.

• I thought some of the most astute commentary came from Robb Montgomery at The Editors Weblog:

The key to me is recognizing that databases are the gold mines fueling the business models in this scenario and how well they are structured, mined and managed will be one of the keys to rolling this plan out. ...  I like how the values are focused on investing in community participation in a never-ending feedback loop. ... Look, what Gannett is really trying to do here is build a new model around their key assets – customer data - deep, local customer data. News, community and marketing data.

That's spot on. In my discussions with Gannett reporters and executives there was a marked focus on how best to utilize little league scores (this came up with multiple, unrelated sources), neighborhood watch information and potholes. In other words, "deep, local customer data." Gannett calls this "hyper-local" news. Robb ends by noting that,

Managing structured data is the linchpin in executing a vision like this. I know that sounds like gibberish to some but, mark my words, getting real smart about managing all of your company's databases will be the key to making this work

Spot on again, and this is why reporters and editors might think about dusting off their CVs, or more to the point, begin thinking about retraining. As Gregory Korte, the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter noted in my Wired News piece, ""The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we're going to have to figure out how to make that transition." The only change I'd make to that quote is to strike "programmers" and sub in "database managers." Gannett exec Michael Maness told me that newsrooms might discover that the folks in research library departments might find themselves well-suited to this new kind of newsroom.

• Rhetorica, the press blog written by Dr. Andrew R. Cline, a journalism prof at the Missouri State, proposes that Gannett owes us something because, " after all, it was Gannett that played a big role in damaging print journalism with the introduction of USA Today--the paper that convinced print it should be like TV."

• Doc Searls welcomes the news, then compares key numbers (circulation, positive vs. negative mentions on Google, et. al.) between the News-Press in my article (Ft. Myers), which has repeatedly experimented with ways to involve readers and make the operation more transparent, and the Santa Barbara News-Press, which is closed in virtually every way. It ain't pretty.

• I left Jeff Jarvis for last, as he gives us a nice bridge between Pro and Con. He applauds Gannett's move on Buzzmachine, but also notes that he's "seen plenty of newsroom reorganizations in my day and they haven’t changed the biorhythms of news yet. ... I fear that the culture of the newsroom will do everything it can to stop this." My own experience in the newsroom – a formative year as a general assignment reporter at the Columbus Dispatch right out of college – makes me share Jeff's fears. There were guys who couldn't adjust to women in the newsroom; can't imagine how they might cotton to amateurs conducting frontline research on stories. Jeff goes on to note, however, that Gannett tends to own smaller papers, filled with young reporters. This point was emphasized by Michael Maness, one of the architects of Gannett's plan, who told me that anymore, cub reporters come in already knowing how to shoot and edit their own video footage so need very little training to move to a multi-media, multi-platform operation.

Read past the jump to hear the critics:

Gannett: When Writing the Story Is the Story

Watching the blogosphere dig its teeth into the Gannett article in Wired News gave me a sense of intellectual vertigo: The story embodied the very subject matter with which it was concerned. Put more plainly, the piece itself was an example of how new and old media can interact to create a reinvigorated form of journalism. To wit: A magazine article inspired a major policy shift at a corporation, which I discovered in doing some reporting for a blog entry a month ago. This led to a scoop I was able to take to my magazine's Web site. I then used the blog to provide supplementary materials, which not only allowed me to provide readers with a peak at the factual framework for the article, but also drove considerable traffic to the blog, which will result in more tips, ideas and contacts for further stories in both print and online versions of Wired. Three platforms working together, feeding off one another. Rad.

The New (Investigative) Journalism

There are several interesting issues raised by Gannett's reorganization, but the one I'm personally most fascinated with is how they will approach investigative, or "watchdog" functions. This hasn't received nearly as much attention as it deserves. Below I'm posting a story about how the Ft. Myers News-Press employed a crowdsourcing model to an investigation into a suspect sewer utility. While I was able to write up a compressed version of the anecdote in my WiredNews piece, that hardly reflects the time I spent with Gannett reporters and executives discussing the News-Press case in particular, and crowdsourced investigations in general. I'll be revisiting this subject over the next few days, but to get us started, here's Gannett's more in-depth coverage of how the News-Press put the crowd to work to great effect:

News-Press Sparks Huge Response with "Crowd-Sourcing" Approach

Journalists at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla are expanding First Amendment and watchdog coverage by engaging readers online.

Using a method called “crowd sourcing” — one of the innovative approaches under Gannett’s strategic plan to news gathering being developed by the Newspaper Division — the News-Press was able to enlist the community in a major investigation into local public utilities.

It began like all good newspaper investigations — complaints about the way the local government was working. Some Cape Coral residents were being asked to pay as much as $28,000 when public utility (water, sewer, irrigation) lines were installed in front of their houses.

But this time, says Mackenzie Warren, deputy to the publisher/special projects at The News-Press, “instead of doing months of investigation and then delivering ‘final’ answers, we told readers: ‘Here’s what we are looking at. You look too and report back to the community over our site.’”

“Obviously, people were unhappy. We wanted to understand why this was happening. Was there mismanagement? Was there shady dealing? So we asked our readers in print and online, ‘Help us find out why Cape Coral’s utility expansion project was costing residents so much,’” Warren says.

Reader response stunned newspaper editors. “Phones rang off the hook. We learned that if you are going to ask people to ‘come join us,’ you better be prepared to receive them. We had no idea of the level of angst waiting to be unleashed,” says Warren.

Information Center FAQ

Dubow's memo (see below) links to an internal Gannett site. Here's the information center FAQ. It's a longish document, but well worth reading as it expands considerably on the brief description of the "seven desks" I posted last night.

FAQ

Q. What is an Information Center?
A. The Information Center is a new way of transforming the process of gathering and disseminating news and information. It is the evolution of the newsroom, focused on gathering the information our readers and viewers want using words, images and video and distributing it across multiple platforms: the daily newspaper, online, mobile, non-daily publications and any other media possible to meet our readers’ needs. Creating an Information Center means retooling the newsroom, expanding into multimedia, embracing community interaction, shifting resources and rethinking the way a community is covered. Gannett’s Newspaper Division, which has conducted a series of pilot programs to create and test the Information Center concept, organized the Center around seven key information gathering areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia. (More about each desk below). Information Centers can be tailored to fit the needs of the individual operations in each division.

Q. Why is Gannett making these changes?
A. Gannett adopted a Strategic Plan in early 2006 that called for the creation of the Information Center as a way to become more customer-centric and innovative in the way we gather and disseminate news and information. Gannett’s mission under the plan is to provide must-have news and information on demand across all media, ever mindful of our journalistic responsibilities.

Q. What is the purpose of the Information Center?
A. The Information Center will enable us to gather and disseminate multimedia news and information in a way more suited to the needs of our customers today. We will deliver the content our audiences want at any time, anywhere and to any device.  As print newsrooms were geared to the scheduling demands of the daily newspaper, the Information Center will be geared to the 24/7 demands of our customers. We will provide more hyper-local information, more databases (restaurants, entertainment, schools, local sports, etc.), more interactive opportunities, more video and more breaking news than we ever have before. And we will deliver it on multiple platforms. The Information Center also is designed to make even better use of the exceptional resources we have. We will make wiser and more strategic use of our employees to do more of what our customers want.