Inspiration Grid by Saatchi & Saatchi Brussels

I like this idea from Saatchi & Saatchi Brussels. On their website they invite people to upload pictures of the things that inspire them. When you flip one of the pictures on the grid there's a little explanation of why someone found it interesting. Nice way to share ideas and inspiration visually.

G-Star is entering into social media territory in their New York Fashion Week Competition

In a previous post I wrote about how crowd sourcing seems to be gaining popularity in advertising, but in this online competition by G-Star the crowd sourcing idea has had a social media layer added to it. People are simply encouraged to sign up for the competition by using the log in from their favorite social networking site. Then it's up to the individual Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or Flicr user to impress the G-Star judges by uploading video, images and writing tweets showcasing their passion for fashion and denim. The most convincing social networking effort in each category is rewarded with a trip to New York Fashion Week where they get to cover the G-Star runway show, and get their reports streamed live on G-Star.com.

The aim is of course to get people to participate and engage with the brand in a more active fashion. But the way the competition is set up also allows G-Star to get a valuable presence in people's social networks and online conversations. Definitely a good attempt at integrating social media and advertising. It will be interesting to see what the development will be like in this area in 2010.

Spotted at Viralblog

Crowdsourcing

Over the last few months the advetising industry seems to have experienced increasing competition from crowdsourced advertising solutions.

First there was the story about Unilever dropping their long time collaboration with advertising agency Lowe back in August. Instead Unilever put up a $10.000 prize for creative ideas for the new Peperami TV commercial on the Idea Bounty web site.

Then there was the launch of the new agency Victors & Spoils in October that claims to be the first crowdsourced ad agency in the world.

And finally Pepsi owned brand Mountain Dew is asking consumers to vote for the best advertising idea on their web site. Both agencies and other creative individuals can submit their ideas.

And there's probably been lots of other similar examples that I haven't noticed.

A couple of years back London agency TBWA had a go at crowdsourcing ideas for some of their briefs. They called it The Big What Adventure and encouraged people to submit their ideas for different campaigns. I don't remember all the details but it's safe to say that it wasn't well received. Advertising bloggers all over the world lined up to have a go at TBWA and acused them of fishing for free ideas and exploiting consumers.

I don't know if it's a question of us becoming more used to the idea of crowdsourcing now or if TBWA really didn't offer a fair deal back then. But people definitely seem more open to crowdsourcing in an advertising context today.

It's going to be very interesting to see how the advertising industry will adapt to this potential threat, and if the corwdsourced business model will be more succesful this time round.