Crowd-sourced TV Advertising Creative

Sorry for the gap in posts. I've had a few invention ideas I've been jotting down - like an automatic egg boiler device, since I always forget the damn thing is there - but this latest one was good enough I wanted to put it out for comment.

So, at this ski trip I'm at, a few friends of mine get to talking while the TV is on, and after a little Absolut Brooklyn, we start doing what MBAs do best - criticizing something and talking about how much better we could do, from the comfort of our couch. In this case, the victim was TV advertising. We agreed on two things: over the past couple of decades, the ad creative (across all mediums) had improved markedly, but each of us either had ideas, or knew people who had ideas, which we thought would be no-brainer winners as ads.

One example suggestion, for a telecoms company (say Verizon): a bunch of elephants are migrating across Africa, but in order to coordinate their migration (these are big herds of big animals), the lead and trail elephants are calling each other with cell phones to plan where they're going. The key visual gag: enormous bluetooth earpieces on the elephants, with the phones ludicrously small by comparison. Maybe the key product focus of the ad is your reception in rural areas, or how widespread your user base is, or how wise everyone knows elephants are. But, elephants with bluetooth headsets - sure winner.

Well, maybe, maybe not. But the point is, most of us have thoughts like these every so often, right? Some of us may have had the gumption to, say, submit ads for Doritos' Super Bowl ad contest. And yet the vast majority of marketing agencies and CPG firms all have big warnings on their online Feedback forms: "DO NOT SEND US PRODUCT OR MARKETING IDEAS, WE CANNOT USE THEM FOR LEGAL REASONS", or the like.

That strikes me as ludicrous. iStockPhoto has many thousands of users, all of whom click through some user agreements which (let's just say) were not crafted by the finest legal minds of our time. And commerce goes on. Ben & Jerry's is well-known for taking flavor suggestions from their users. Doritos clearly crowd-sourced a Super Bowl ad. We're not breaking new legal ground here - some executives have, I think, just been made paranoid by their General Counsel, and inertia sets in.

So how's this for a market opportunity? Do the iStockPhoto for commercial advertising. Solve the dual problems of crowd-sourcing and legal issues for all these brands.

• Take a product you love and propose to the company which makes it that they do this or that-themed commercial.
• Paying corporate clients can post contests publicly, winners get a predefined prize, credit on the website, payment-in-kind, etc.
• Users can submit ideas which aren't for a specific company, but instead for a broad industry (i.e. the elephant example above, which could frankly work for any major telecoms firm). Perhaps for even broader ideas, they tag a bunch of industries for which it could work, in order to simplify searching/browsing of ideas.
• Corporate marketers searching for ideas (the customer, really) agree in advance that if they're going to use an idea, they will have to offer some compensation, but otherwise they can listen to the ideas for free (and the users agree that they can).
• As a first-pass, we'd try negotiated compensation. Submitters put an offer price up, an interested marketer counters with a bid price, they negotiate offline for whatever forms of compensation they agree on.
• Users vote on each other's ideas. If you're submitting this stuff for fun, you'll want to take inspiration from others' creativity, and judge peoples' dumb ideas. Highly rated people get browsed by customers more readily, and can probably charge a higher price for their best ideas.
• In theory, you wouldn't have to limit this to TV advertising. Digital advertising usually doesn't depend too much on the creative, but maybe there are innovative campaign ideas (particularly viral ones) that people want to suggest. Same with physical display ad campaigns, or even (*gasp*) print ads. My hypothesis is, most user ideas will be in the form of TV ads, but might as well remain open to all possibilities.

Okay, enough with the fantasy here. What are the risks of this business? As with VCs refusing to sign NDAs for entrepreneurs who come to them with the ideas, the risk for the corporate marketer is that someone who had an idea will sue when they see something like it on the TV. We can, of course, track whether anyone actually saw that post or not, but there's some legal risk here. We'd need some pretty airtight legal agreements drawn up.

The biggest risk isn't a competitive risk, though, it's simple user adoption. Before we get brand managers spending their precious time, we need content. I think it would be pretty easy to kick-start a community for this, though:

1. Convince a few brand managers to sponsor contests in their industry, with no guarantee of a winner being awarded but any winners (meaning, the company uses the idea) get nontrivial cash.
2. Promote to the marketing clubs of major business schools and the departments of major undergrad programs - anyone in a Communications or Marketing major fancies themselves a great ad designer. Maybe some of them are.
3. There are fanclubs of all sorts of products out there, forums, etc. It doesn't take a genius guerrilla marketer to find a bunch of them and promote the site to those kind of rapid adopters. Find me a mass-market product and I'll find you some group of people who love it so much that they want to talk to other people about it.
4. Surely some video editors out there with some free time would actually produce video mock-ups of some of these ideas (or their own). That would be some flashy content which we could promote on the homepage and also use to rope people in.

What I love about this idea is how big a competitive advantage the network effects would be. Implemented properly, with a critical mass of power users and enough brands engaged, only one site like this could really exist on the internet. Anyone with an ad idea would want it to reach the most number of people possible.

Over the past 15 years, our information sources have gone from top-down (Big 3 networks for TV, major national newspapers) to bottom-up, across not just media but many sections of commerce and society. Yet our advertising creative continues to be the domain of specialized knowledge workers who are paid a lot of money to come up with ideas that may or may not work, and may even backfire. Maybe the average Joe couldn't do as well as your Don Draper types on first try, but a million average Joes will surely have some diamonds in the rough.