The advertising industry's latest crowdsourcing wheeze took off in Vancouver
Devo – remember them? Jocko Homo. Whip It? No? Amusing US new wave outfit with plant pots on their heads talking in vaguely eugenicist terms about mankind as spud people? No? To be fair, they haven't released an album since 1990. So how did they end up opening the Winter Olympics?
Crowdsourcing. This is adland's new favourite tool – defined as taking jobs traditionally given to employees and getting anyone who happens to be online to do it for you for nothing. When Devo turned to the US arm of the hotshot London-based ad agency Mother to ask for help with their album launch this May, Mother went for a total rebrand. And why focus group those concepts? That's so Sterling Cooper. Instead, Mother New York set up a website where the rebranding project took place and a mysterious virtual agency in LA – with the creative department replaced by Devo fans and the online community. As a result, the new look Devo (similar to old look Devo except older and with blue instead of red hats) burst on to the scene. The rebrand goes further than hats, of course. The band are choosing the tracks for a new album on the same crowdsourcing principle – moving the usual bitter wrangle between drummer and guitarist over how to open the show into a bitter multinational row between anonymous haters.
But why stop there? Crowdsourcing seems to offer so much to the entire media industry. No need for TV programme ideas any more. Crowdsource your scripts. Newspapers, meanwhile, can crowdsource opinion pieces. Political parties – why create expensive ad campaigns when you can post a couple of poorly designed posters on the net and have thousands of mashups spread like wildfire until they hit the headlines all over the world? Oh, wait a minute ...
Mother's co-founder, Linus Karlsson, says: "We're testing a new model, a 'soup-to-nuts' virtual office environment, where people share ideas and unite digitally. Los Angeles seemed to be the perfect location to do this; not only is it a hard city to commute in, and where both the band and Warner Bros are located, it is also a town where it's sometimes hard to tell what's real and what's fake, what's fact and what's fiction."
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