Crowdsourcing has been front page lately as a smart thing to do. Jeff Howe, contributing editor of Wired Magazine has an entire blog dedicated to how it can be successful. I asked Leighton Hubbell to walk through a few of the pitfalls of crowdsourcing for communication, design and brand building.
Leighton is founder of leightonhubbell.com, a one-man design shop in Southern California. We met nearly 20 years ago as students at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Since then, he has nurtured an award-winning career with stops at DDB Needham Dallas Worldwide, where he won a Clio for his work on Pepsi, and other stops for branding agencies in Hawaii and Southern California.
jasongramke: I first heard about crowdsourcing a few years ago from an Online graphic design community. What kind of trends have you seen in the last several months with advertisers and their desire to crowdsource?
leightonhubbell: Well, it seems with the current recession there has been a big surge in a few things: 1) Start-up companies created from people who have left their jobs either voluntarily or from layoffs. 2) Companies trying to cut short-term creative costs in any way they can. 3) People trying to diversify their skill sets to help ease their financial burdens.
Everyone hears in the press all of the awful things that are going on out there with the economy and business. It is very obvious that much of the past business ways and structures are going to change or fall away as things reset in the coming months and years. And as these new structures are created, the press will want to showcase them in an effort to ease consumer confidence.
One of the many new trends is crowdsourcing, or the act of assigning a task to a group to help get the best possible result through shear numbers of solutions presented.
As showcased in Wired, crowdsourcing is a rather progressive way to get rather massive, data intensive tasks completed by taking literally hundreds of people and their computers to work on something in a matter of days that a huge supercomputer might take weeks or months to complete. This allows groups to contribute and lets enthusiasts help out in their free time.
So, looking at this concept, other industries like advertising and marketing have been looking at different ways to apply this same theory. I don’t blame them, they are just trying to please their clients and possibly recoup some of the profits they’re losing every year with budgets getting smaller and smaller. It remains to be seen if this is just talk or that they are still in observation mode at the moment.
jg: One thing I’ve noticed about a company interested in crowdsourcing is that they are generally unsophisticated marketers. What do you think is the single most dangerous thing for a new company looking to crowdsource its work, whether it’s a company logo or product brochure, etc.?
lh: Generally, product brochures, websites, ads and other collateral are very important to the branding of a company, but they can be fairly easily changed if need be. In my experience, there have been times when competitors have had very similar creative direction happening simultaneously – almost to the point of looking like they came from the same agency. Obviously, they didn’t, but that can happen. This can be fine for cyclical marketing such as advertising, because the campaign is always changing and evolving depending on your customer.
On the other hand, with a key component like a logo, this can be very problematic. The logo can be placed not only on business cards and stationery, but clothing, signage, websites, brochures, trade show booths, vehicles and even buildings.
To replace a previously trademarked logo could be a devastating event for a new or start-up company and quite expensive for an existing one (ex: Quark). It would be like spending your seed money twice.
jg: You mention the Brooklyn pawn shop, All Citi Pawn, in your article What you won’t get when crowdsourcing your logo. They’re getting squeezed pretty tight by Citi Group for a pretty hard foul on their trademark. What steps do you take to ensure the work you produce is original, other than not ripping a Fortune 50 corporate trademark?
lh: I am a very seasoned logo designer, and I try very hard to keep abreast of the current logo designs and trends. Even though I will be able to steer my clients away from anything currently conflicting, I know that legally that’s not enough. There are so many logo designs being created all the time, and one person simply cannot keep up. Informally, there are websites that you can do a reverse image search, which can work during the concept stage. For my clients, I recommend a trademark search done by a certified trademark attorney.
A trademark attorney specializes in trademark searches, legal issues and helping you to correctly file your paperwork. That way your logo/trademark is protected, and has a certified creation date in the event of a conflict.
jg: I have a teenaged son who is a freshman in college and I’ve gotten to know some of his buddies. A couple of whom are in the crowd. It seems that a good number of the designers in the crowd are in high school and college looking for quick cash to pay campus parking tickets and a weekend diet of Suzy Q’s and Pabst Blue Ribbon. What are two of the most important advantages you can bring to the table that the crowd can’t provide?
lh: I think the first of the two advantages is the lack of derivative work. As I mentioned before, I have been designing logos for a very long time. The bulk of the work I see in many of these contests is regurgitated and overly obvious design ideas. I say design ideas, because many of these logos are just visual/type treatments and not conceptual logo design. The work I bring to the table is the work that is two rounds of concepts later, and not the first thing that comes to your mouse.
The other advantage is the time I take to ask the right questions. Even though the client has filled out a ‘creative brief’, I always try to talk with the client about their business further. What expectations do you have for the logo redesign? How will that affect your business? Where are you going? Where have you been? These are just a few of the questions, but the face or conversation time is what’s most important. I don’t always get to speak directly with my clients, but I try and have a healthy dialogue going with them about the assignment and their needs. You can’t get that through a contest window.
jg: I mentioned earlier that crowdsourcing is typically interesting to unsophisticated marketers. However, I recently heard rumblings from the marketing department of a Fortune 100 company about crowdsourcing specific projects. What is your thought about crowdsourcing small-budget low-impact projects but hiring an agency for the larger scale Brand work and messaging?
lh: I have done a great deal of reading about the crowdsourcing phenomenon and I agree with it in many different applications. From a data collection, problem-solving or the open-source software front, I think there are a lot of worthy uses of the combined ingenuity of many. However, I don’t think this is one of them.
The branding and messaging of a Fortune 100 company is a very specialized task that requires focus, experience and creativity. Trying to keep all the components of a branding message on point is hard enough to do with an agency, let alone adding the efforts of scores of others to the mix.
There are a few issues at hand here, really. First, I wonder if brand managers are willing to risk the wrangling of a crowdsourcing situation to keep their respective brands in check. Will it be time and money well spent? How much control do you give the participants and when?
And, most importantly who will get compensation in the end? The sourcing company or the participants? Are the participants willing to invest their time into a relationship that seems to be rather one-sided? How will they be compensated and will it be enough knowing that the crowd is doing the heavy lifting and company is the one making the money or getting the most benefit from it?
It sounds very efficient and progressive in theory, but I wonder what happens after you mix in old human nature after awhile? Only time will tell.
Read Leighton’s full article on crowdsourcing at his blog, www.leightonhubbell-blog.com
