Harley Davidson taps internet vroom-vroom

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 03 November 2010 15:10

Business IT - Networking

An advertising 2.0 company, established to tap the wisdom of crowds, last week received 590 different creative ideas for a new Harley Davidson campaign, after putting out the brief over the internet. It's just one example of how internet based crowds are starting to disrupt conventional business practices an international summit was told today.

John Winsor, CEO of Victors & Spoils, an ad agency built on crowdsourcing principles, has established a 3000 strong crowd of creatives that the agency taps for ideas on behalf of clients. It's a far cry from the traditional Madison Avenue approach as documented in the hit TV show Mad Men - but it's interesting enough for the company to have so far signed up clients such as American Express, Coca Cola and Oakley besides Harley Davidson.

Speaking at the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010 which was organised by the Insight Exchange and held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco courtesy of Cisco's telepresence technology, Mr Winsor however acknowledged that there were challenges. 'We have to figure out how to manage the workflow' associated with those 590 ideas, he said.

It was also important for the sustainability of the model for people tapping into clouds to make sure that there was value not just for clients, but crowd participants. 'How do we build the community, not just use the crowd?' he mused.

Advertising agencies tapping into these vast pools of talent also had to work out how to protect the privacy and confidentiality of their clients. Mr Winsor said that in some instances this had led to members of the Victor & Spoils crowd being asked to sign non disclosure agreements prior to being provided with the client brief.

The crowd members selected to participate then went through a sort of beauty contest with the people having the best ideas invited to participate in the final project.

Alex Edelstein, ceo of CloudCrowd and a director of Kiva.org, said; 'Hardly anyone appreciates how disruptive this underlying technology will be.' He said crowdsourcing would be particularly interesting once companies learned how to create virtual assembly lines where different crowds completed different elements of a task.

'This has a truly disruptive capacity'¦of a scale not seen since China got into manufacturing in the 1990s,' said Mr Edelstein.