Thursday, July 4, 2013

Six Partnerships that Prove How Crowdsourcing is Going Mainstream

Posted on  by Yannig Roth

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In a recent blog post titled Five Signs That Crowdsourcing 
Will Cross The Chasm in 2013, François Pétavy (CEO of eYeka) 
examined some current trends and explained why he thinks 
crowdsourcing will go mainstream in 2013. He argued that 
crowdsourcing now solves real business problems, that the 
ROI of crowdsourcing is easier to demonstrate, but also that 
in recent years.
If we take a step back, we can see that he’s right. Six partnerships 
between crowdsourcing companies and major corporations 
have been announced since December 2011, proving that big players 
start integrating crowdsourcing in their innovation, marketing and 
communication strategies. ADK, Booz Allen Hamilton, Edelman, 
Sony, Deloitte and Unilever have signed strategic partnerships 
with different crowdsourcing providers in the last months. 
Who said that crowdsourcing was a fad?

ADK partnered with eYeka in 

December 2011

The first major marketing group to strategically invest into 
crowdsourcing was ADK. In December 2011, the Japanese
creative agency Asatsu-DK, or ADK, announced the formation 
of a strategic partnership with creative crowdsourcing 
specialist eYeka. Effective as of December 1st 2011, the 
partnership allowed ADK to tap into eYeka’s online community 
of 250,000 consumers to solve its clients creative challenges. 
Japan’s third largest advertising agency recognized that 
crowdsourcing creative ideas was an effective way to help 
its clients to innovate.
The duty of an agency is to embrace change before 
its clients do, so we have decided to take the lead 
with a new, open model where we integrate consume 
ideas from start (Kenichiro Omori, head of global 
business division, ADK)
Since the announcement, the two companies having
already initiated a number of projects across the World. 
One of them was the “Stand for Japan” project, winner 
of the 2012 Co-Creation Awards in the Not-For-profit Marketing 
& Communication category, where people from all over the 
World were invited to create imagery that showed what  made 
Japan truly unique to them. The campaign generated over 
300 submissions from 41 countries such as France and even China, 
with the best visuals shown at the ADK Shochiku Square 
and exhibited at Ad:tech TokyoThe project is a good example 
of how crowdsourcing can bring fresh and creative ideas 
from a diverse group of consumers.

Booz Allen Hamilton partnered

with Innocentive in December 2011 

InnoCentive (Video Thumbnail)
A few days after the above partnership was 
announced, crowdsourcing pionneer 
innocentive announced a strategic alliance 
with the management and technology consulting 
firm Booz Allen Hamilton. This alliance provided 
Booz Allen Hamilton’s commercial and government 
clients an integrated open innovation solution, 
including a “Booz Allen Hamilton-InnoCentive Open 
Innovation Diagnostic Program” and, of course, the 
prize-based crowdsourcing challenges that 
Innocentive pioneered since 2001.
We find that agencies are 
serious about leveraging new tools
and methods to find innovative 
solutions to problems

(Allan Steinhardt, VP, Booz Allen Hamilton)

Edelman PR partnered with 

Poptent in August 2012

But crowdsourcing is not only used for
innovation and marketing, it is also increasingly
used in the video advertising spaceOne of the 
established actors in the field is Poptent, who announced 
a partnership with Edelman, the world’s largest public 
relations firm, in August 2012. The objective of the 
partnership, which was effective immediately, was 
that Edelman would use Poptent’s network of videographers
to create relevant and authentic video content for Edelman’s 
clients, as the announcement explained.
We are experiencing strong global client demand for
 original online and offline video content, so the time is

right for Edelman and Poptent to join forces (Caroline
Dettman, Executive Creative Director, Edelman)

Crowd sourcing represents a cost-effective 
way to produce video content for the 
PR firm’s clients, to be used in social 
media campaigns, public service announcements
and other integrated communication efforts, 
both online and offline. Neil Perry, president 
of Poptent, explained in an interview that 
the video crowd sourcing company 
already worked with PR companies 
besides Edelman, including Ogilvy PR, 
who crowdsourced videos for Intel.

Sony CEA partnered with Mofilm

in April 2013


Another partnership in the video crowdsourcing 
space was recently announced by Sony Computer
Entertainment America (SCEA), who partnered with the UK-based
crowdsourcing company Mofilm. Previously to the announcement,
SCEA worked with Mofilm to produce content for the launch of 
“LittleBigPlanet Karting” in the USA, and for the “Live in a State of Play”
campaign for the PlayStation brand.
As PlayStation moves into its next phase of growth, we 
look forward to continuing our work with Mofilm as our 
agency of record for crowdsourced advertising (Guy Longworth,
SVP, PlayStation Brand Marketing, SCEA)
It is interesting that the words used in the announcement are that of the
advertising world (“hiring [...] advertising agency Mofilm“), which shows that
Mofilm positions itself similarly to traditional advertising agencies, and
definitely plays in that universe. If you go on Mofilm’s contest website, you
will see that references to the advertising world are numerous, including
annual brand contests for the Cannes Lions in Cannes.

Deloitte partnered with Kaggle in May 2013


Kaggle is a crowdsourcing platform that focuses on data analysis. 
Surfing on the wave of Big Data, the company has secured a 
partnership with Deloitte Australia, combining Kaggle’s 
nearly 100,000-strong data scientists with the analytics 
professionals from Deloitte Analytics’ network in order 
to expand its $2 billion global data analytics business. 
The partnership with Deloitte is Kaggle’s first global partnership.
We can now help clients apply data to yield even more effective 
and timely business insights [via] Deloitte Analytics’ wide-ranging
in-house capabilities but also [by using] Kaggle (Anthony Viel,

National Managing Partner, Deloitte Analytics)
As Business Review Weekly notes, the Kaggle-Deloitte partnership is
non-exclusive (which is not the case of some of the above), so Kaggle can
team up with other accounting and consulting firms in the future. But Kaggle
says that this is not a problem a the start-up plans to team up with other 
Deloitte offices in the US and Britain within the next 12 months. “The
next stepwill not be for us to work with competitors, but to see Deloitte 
take this globally,”Kaggle president and chief scientist Jeremy Howard 
says, “we see this as a major part of our business.”

Unilever partnered with eYeka in June 2013


The latest major announcement isUnilever’s partnership 
with eYeka, a crowdsourcing specialist already
mentioned above for its partnership with ADK. The FMCG-giant has
signed a contract that shows its intent to further tap into the open 
creativity and crowdsourcing platform that eYeka has nurtured over
the last few years. The appointment is official as of June 7th, and covers
markets across Asia Pacific, Middle East, Russia and South Africa.
We have worked with the eYeka community for two years
on a number of projects and now extend that relationship
further and deeper (Rahul Welde, VP Media for Asia, Africa,
Middle East, Turkey and Russia, Unilever)
The eYeka community has already worked with a number
of Unilever brands such as ClearClose UpComfortCornetto
LifebuoyLiptonLuxPond’sand even the Unilever brand itself. 
From now on, eYeka’s online community can be expected to work 
across more of Unilever’s brands on innovation, 
marketing and communication-related contests.

Conclusion

These partnerships are strong signs that crowdsourcing
is a viable business solution for a variety of organizations. 
The above examples 
indicate that agencies (ADK, Edelman), consultancies
(Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte) and brand organizations 
(Sony, Unilever) alike embrace crowdsourcing! 
In some cases, organizations are looking for the crowd’s 
brainpower to solve technical problems (Innocentive, Kaggle), 
and in some cases it’s more about creative idea generation 
(eYeka) or video content production (eYeka, Poptent, Mofilm).

Now that crowdsourcing is crossing 
the chasm, it may soon turn out 
that not leveraging it will become a 
competitive disadvantage,” said
François Pétavy in Five Signs That 
Crowdsourcing Will Cross The 
Chasm in 2013.
All the partnerships described above
are strong signals thatconfirms that 
crowdsourcing is being recognized as a 
business accelerator. “We have long 
advocated turning to consumers for 
ideas and content with consumers as 
a source of competitive advantage,
says François Pétavy about his 
company’s partnership with Unilever, 
so we are thrilled to partner with 
Unilever to bring this approach to 
new scale.” There will certainly be 
more partnerships announced in the 
future. And crowdsourcing 
will continue making inroads 
into mainstream business practice.
image credit: elliecrocker.com
Clearworks
- See more at: http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog
/2013/06/10/six-partnerships-that-prove-how-crowdsourcing
-is-going-mainstream/#sthash.pS6qkKR3.dpuf

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