However, such stories should not mislead marketers to believe that crowdsourcing is a quick way to achieve amazing results.  In contrast, reaching out to a large average crowd can actually overwhelm marketers with the sheer number of ideas they receive, and the time and effort in sifting through those ideas can be much larger than engaging an agency to do the job. Moreover, the ideas can also turn out to be completely off-track and unusable.

That said, the good news is—some new agency models have evolved over the last 3-4 years that help to conduct, what can be called, “targeted crowdsourcing” or “expertsourcing.” Here, instead of broadcasting a project brief to masses, only select few specialists are chosen to do the assignment.

Here are some examples of such models:

• Giant Hydra: Giant Hydra provides marketers and ad agencies access to a global pool of creative professionals.  However, unlike a typical crowdsourcing platform where professionals compete against each other, Giant Hydra is built on the principles of “collaboration.” Clients are able to create a team by choosing professionals having skills and experience best suited for the assignment. The team then works together in a private online environment to build on each others’ ideas, while the client is able to oversee the process and ensure the team doesn’t go off-track. Though the platform is primarily designed for agencies to tap outside talent, the interesting thing is—they can also use it to connect their geographically dispersed offices on a single project.
• GeniusRocket: It initially started as a contest-based crowdsourcing platform for video content, but later moved to a model where every member—copywriters, creative directors, animators, production companies—is vetted by GeniusRocket, thus maintaining a smaller but high-quality pool. There is a staged process where professionals first pitch concepts, instead of coming up with the final products directly, and the clients choose which concepts progress to the next stage.
• Victors & Spoils: Victors & Spoils was launched by two former Crispin Porter + Bogusky executives in Oct 2009, as an alternative to traditional ad agencies. The company also maintains a virtual pool—a digital database—of thousands of creative professionals, and taps into this pool as needed. However, what differentiates the company from other crowdsourcing or expertsourcing platforms is that it acts as a curator of ideas. So, when it receives an assignment from a client, it not only creates the brief and selects suitable professionals for that assignment, but also makes sure the ideas received from them are of good quality. The model therefore eliminates the time and effort required for clients to give direction to professionals or sift through large number of ideas submitted by them. Just two years into business, the company already boasts of Harley-Davidson (it’s interesting how the company got this account), Nike Foundation, Mercedes-Benz and Unilever as its clients.
• Co:Collective: Co:Collective, launched last year by former JWT executives, is another addition to the curated crowdsourcing space. It employs a small core group of thinkers, and “outsources” the implementation to a network of affiliated specialty companies based on the requirements of each assignment.

While it’s difficult to say how much traction these new models are going to gain and whether they have the potential to outdo the traditional agencies, one thing is sure—they have given one more reason for agencies to shed their complacency.

Have you tried any of the above models? Did it work as you expected? Do share your experiences in the comments below.

Here are five ideas for getting the most out of your agency partnerships – you can find more here:

Select well. With the multitude of agencies, large and small, specialized and generalist, out there – companies generally have their pick of vendors to work with. Instituting a rigorous selection process can avoid the inevitable headaches that will come should the agency you choose be a bad fit.

We’ve created a guide to the agency selection process, all the way from internal preparation to post-pitch feedback and new agency appointment.

Onboard effectively, and set clear expectations. If you’re an MLC member, you work for a giant, global company – and oftentimes, huge companies like the ones you work for can have an internal language, vocabulary and perspective that are incomprehensible to outsiders. It’s an inevitable byproduct of being a part of a large organization – and it can put outsiders, like agencies, at a disadvantage.

Onboarding and expectation-setting are key, then, in making sure that the adjustment isn’t too bad. One MLC member reframed the onboarding process as a customer-centric one, explaining objectives not in terms of organizational prerogatives but in the language of the customer experience.

Manage and structure agency teams for collaboration. Speaking as a former agency employee, I can tell you first hand – agencies jealously guard the work they have with clients, and it’s not in their nature to want to collaborate too much. Not just for the obvious money-related reasons, but there can also be rivalries between agencies that can foster anti-collaborative behavior.

What’s the easiest way to eliminate this? Force agencies to collaborate by building it into the inter-agency relationships (via a lead agency model, for instance) and evaluate agency partners based on process, as well as results. If they’re not playing nice, let them know.

Evaluate fairly, holistically and thoroughly. As mentioned above, the key variable that should be present is agency evaluations is their ability to collaborate with other agencies and with the client. To that end, peer review and project-level evaluations can be a great way to get insight into the day-to-day workings of your agency teams, and to figure out where bottlenecks to collaboration lie.

Compensate intelligently. Choose from one of the five models of effective agency compensation, and tie discretionary and incentive compensation directly back to key behaviors like collaboration, rather than overall firm performance or ad volumetrics.

While the cost/benefit logistics on paper are straightforward, some argue that the human element aspect makes it unsustainable.  One reason for this is because most qualified creatives will not stay at the host company, and even if the lesser talent does stay, the work quality is not going to be its best.  Using a sports analogy to see the agency’s viewpoint, no team is going to send his or her best players to go sit in the reserves for another team, and by the same token, no agency wants to give away its best talent.  For this reason, many clients say “no” to moving agencies in-house and instead opt for using external creatives and treating them more like a consultative partner.

Purely from a cost and maintenance standpoint, many companies, on the contrary, advocate for moving certain agencies in-house, such as  designers, copywriters, and planners.  This also allows them to respond quickly to the needs of the client and to be more efficient.  While these agency employees provide convenience, having an outside perspective on bigger, more strategic campaigns is still crucial, which is why supplemental external shops remain the weapon of choice for these projects.

Furthermore, one executive in particular remarks on her company’s positive experience with agencies, commenting on the benefits of having an in-house creative staff.  In this company scheme, the agency group “bids” on projects they want to work on by presenting a cost estimate and creative proposal to management.  This allows the agency to “play nicely” with the company’s internal groups, as well as save money on projects that can later be used to cover print errors or other events if need be.  In addition, with a minimal budget and an expandable capacity, the ability to produce large quantities of work is certainly available and the need for external shops is eliminated.

MLC members, to see more of the discussion on the topic, visit our Org & Ops forum here.  If you’re interested in creative ideation and execution in-house, be sure to check out our study on Building an Agile Creative Development Process.

There’s no shortage of sensational reporting on the sponsors.  For example, there’s an interesting report here on the buzz between Nike and Adidas (the official sponsor). Observation: the PR success for Adidas from the Jabulani ball has, like the flight of the ball, been erratic and unpredictable, but probably a net positive for Adidas. 

Meanwhile, other sponsors fled like rats off a sinking ship to get away from the implosion of the French national team.  Sacre (les) Bleus!

Non-sponsor brands also saw their share of action. In a provocative tale of ambush marketing, 36 female Dutch fans were detained for wearing orange miniskirts, evidently a clear symbol of Bavaria beer (NOT an official sponsor, by the way).

But beyond all the buzz and antics, what characterizes great, enduring world cup sponsorship marketing?

It’s safe to say that strong integrated marketing is at the core.  Plus, you’d expect vivid experiential and compelling social components. Moreover, in a global event such as the world cup, you’d want to see worldwide activation of the sponsorship.  Delivering all of this is a tall order.  In most cases, sponsors will have enlisted the creative brains, arms and legs of an entire roster of agencies to pull it off.

Looking behind the curtain, most client-agency models fall short.  Aligning a multitude of agency partners to play ball and truly collaborate–acting as if part of one team–is very difficult given competing incentives, inertia and agency allegiance.

That’s why we were fascinated to understand how Coca-Cola set up what it called “Red Lounge” to carry off its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics several years ago. Coke established this different-in-kind agency structure to go well beyond the coordination that clients usually settle for when working with multiple agency partners.  Coke was shooting for deeper collaboration, hoping that it could get it’s agency partners to build on each others’ ideas, and get to that magical 1 + 1 = 3 land.

In effect, what Red Lounge did is establish a common identity among different participating agency personnel–an identity that trumped the allegiance and incentives of  any individual on the team toward his or her home agency. Coke used a clever mix of structure, individual and joint incentives, team leadership, and psychological techniques to engender this “one team” kind of environment.  This led the agency personnel to check their competitive baggage at the door, and partner to create and activate world-class marketing.  As a result, by most accounts, the Olympic marketing effort was a huge success for Coke.

We’re eagerly watching to see how Coke performs when all is said and done at the 2010 World Cup.  Good luck to the sponsor brands in the final days of the Cup.

By the way, my pick for tournament winner?  The country where the rain stays mainly on the plain.  If I get that wrong, you can bet I’ll blame Paul, the prognosticating German octopus.  No kidding.

MLC Members, check out the Coca-Cola Red Lounge case study, which is part of a larger research study on creating high return agency partnerships (the Coke case study starts on p. 24).  The study also includes casework from companies like Clorox and Mars.

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

In talking with marketers about Social Media, we hear about good and not-so-good experiences with vendors in the space.  In many cases, calling on outside expertise makes sense – but matching Marketing’s needs with a vendor’s capabilities can be tricky in this rapidly growing market.  Here are a few things to consider (for those primarily interested in the iPad … skip to #3!)

1. Which Social Media objective will the vendor help us accomplish?

This sounds like an obvious one, but has been problematic for a number of marketers.  Across the reviews in our Vendor Review Database, the evaluation measure “Achieved Our Objective” rates lowest in satisfaction.  This is a good question answer, if only to cement Marketing’s goals.

2. What internal investments are needed to work with this vendor?

The amount of internal time and brainpower needed to use deliverables from social media vendors catches some marketers off guard.  We’ve heard about a number of organizations that subscribe to listening or monitoring services only to find they don’t have the FTEs to effectively use the service.  Most products from social media vendors require some degree of internal input – whether that’s moderating an online community, choosing metrics to track, or overlaying customer purchase data with social behaviors.  Knowing the full cost of a vendor’s service before signing on the dotted line is critical.

3. Have my peers had good experiences with this vendor?

There’s no substitute for a customer review!  Unlike Amazon, you won’t find a star rating and set of reviews under every vendor description.  To help our members navigate this, the MLC has launched a Social Media Vendor Review Database (you can read more about the review database, or MLC members can jump straight to the database).

To help grow our vendor review database, we’re sponsoring an iPad drawing for MLC members who complete a review form before June 15^th.  The form takes about 5 minutes – just tell us about a vendor you’ve worked with and the iPad could be yours!

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Looking for help developing your social media strategy?  Want a new Facebook application but don’t know where to start? The growth of social media has given rise to a flood of new vendors proffering solutions to almost every aspect of social media marketing.

To help harness collective knowledge of vendor performance, the Marketing Leadership Council launched a Social Media Vendor Review Tool, where marketers can review vendors they’ve worked with and access other reviews from peers.

We’ve collected 36 reviews to date, and we’ve noticed a few general trends across these reviews:

• Across social media objectives that vendors were engaged to help with, Listening (capturing insights and feedback from target customers) was by far the most prevalent, followed by Talking (Sharing information with target customers) .
• Reviewers were especially pleased with the expertise of vendor teams, and with the level of client service they experienced.
• Reviewers expressed more ambivalence with regard to value relative to cost and achievement of objectives, with about a 25% reporting neutral or dissatisfied views across these metrics.

These last two trends suggest that while there are some highly skilled social media vendors out there, Marketers may be having trouble matching the right vendor to the right objective in order to maximize value. 

Member Ratings of 36 Social Media Vendors | Click Image to Enlarge

MLC members, check out the vendor reviews your peers have submitted.  Find out which vendor’s “startup and deliverables have been very late” — and which vendor has done a great job with long term WOM strategy and short-term experimentation.  Better yet: help us keep the vendor review database alive by reviewing a vendor you’ve worked with here.

Mountain: Post-Mountaintop Removal

2009 was a year of taking sledgehammers to budgets, not least agency spend.  Many marketers have relied on the equivalent of mountaintop removal to get at those agency savings.  They’ve launched agency reviews or have consolidated agency relationships.  These approaches are imprecise, crude and unsightly—but can be effective in reducing spend. 

However, most of these marketers will be under continued budget pressure in 2010.  The problem with mountaintop blasting is that, once you do it, you can’t play that card again (uh, the top of the mountain is gone).  So what are marketers to do to find additional cost savings that won’t harm communications quality? 

The answer lies in the many hundreds of individual-level, daily interactions happening between client and agency personnel.  Council research suggests that many clients have 25%+ in potential labor savings tied up here.  But to get at them requires a technique far more precise than mountaintop removal.  To extend the mining metaphor, you need something more like solution mining.

In the business world, that’s lean process management.  I know, I know.  You’re thinking “fat chance of applying lean management to a creative activity involving fundamentally right-brained people.”  But hear me out. 

The key insight enabling marketers to get those 25%+ in labor savings is this: you don’t apply lean process management to the creative activities themselves—you apply it to the dozens of process steps surrounding those creative activities.

MLC members: evaluate whether you might be able to apply lean techniques.  See this case study and then view this webinar replay showing how one CPG reduced labor by over 45% in FSI production. 

Here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Pilot with a low-risk, highly-repeated marcomm activity: there are dozens you could choose from (see the last page of the case study for a list), but find one that would be a low-risk test case.
2. Use a neutral party to facilitate: You’ll want a neutral party (i.e., outside of marketing) to ensure an objective view of individual process steps. 
3. Aim for high granularity in your process mapping—the savings come from making a set of surgical changes to an often overlooked set of steps in the processes we repeat over and over with our agency partners.  Granularity matters.

For a good, short read on lean process application, see this WSJ piece detailing how Starbucks has applied lean in its shops.

Having now conducted dozens of consults with members who have completed their social media maturity diagnostic, we noticed a real appetite amongst members for help navigating this kaleidoscopic (is that even a word?) vendor landscape. 

Everyone from Jeff Bezos at Amazon to the mass of worldwide trendspotters at Trendwatching is touting the power of consumer-generated online product and service ratings.  That sparked a thought…why not bring the Council network to bear against a social media vendor ratings system?  So we are.

If the first 15 member submissions are any guide, you can expect to get an unvarnished view—the average member rating on social media vendors is 3.7 on a five point scale.  Compare that to the average product rating online by consumers at 4.3 (fun read in the WSJ on consumer rating grade inflation).  We promise you this: we won’t selectively forget to include negative ratings in the database.

But to make this work, your peers in the Marketing Leadership Council need your help.  Have any experience with a social media vendor, good, bad or ugly?  MLC members, please take 5 minutes to share your experience via this confidential online review form.  Those members who share their experience will get advance access to the vendor ratings exchange, which we will deliver online to the broader membership in Q1 2010.

Click Image to Enlarge

In fact, we found that two-thirds of clients are establishing lead or full-service agency partnership models in hopes of achieving integrated communications.  But if you ask clients their likelihood of recommending their current agency partners on their ability to deliver the most target-resonant creative or touchpoint ideas, you get embarrassing NPS scores (see the graphic at left). 

What gives?

Here’s the problem: the cast of characters on the typical agency roster is too far removed from today’s target audiences to routinely and convincingly clear a higher authenticity bar. 

Click Image to Enlarge

By contrast, the ideal model would have clients reaching outside of the typical agency box to pull in partners who are much closer to—and who intimately know—the target audience (see the “amoeba” graphic at left).  For these creative partners, the oculesics, paralanguage, and vocalics of the target audience come naturally (see my last post if this is Greek to you).

To take an example, while heading up marketing with Toyota, Jim Farley and team used this amoeba model to engineer deep resonance and authenticity into the Tundra re-launch blitz.  Behind the curtains, Toyota augmented its standing agency roster by pulling in a dozen different creative partners who were deeply knowledgeable of the “true trucker” target audience.

To be sure, this model calls for greater collaboration between agencies and these smaller creative partners.  And that requires a firm hand from the client coupled with an ability to instill a sense of security in lead agencies—Farley and team were able to deliver here. 

The model isn’t right for all brands or all situations, by any stretch, but its more likely to regularly deliver authentic creative than most existing models.  If you’re asking yourself, “Can I really muster the courage to try this?”, you owe it to yourself to also ask, “What’s the price of falling below the authenticity bar?” 

MLC members: take a look at the webinar replay of the Toyota case study, in which Kim McCullough, head of marketing communications, shares her perspective on implementing the model.  The full case study includes details on how Toyota selected the right creative partners and how they managed agency roles and responsibilities differently to create an atmosphere of collaboration.

If you like that, you’ll love the broader study: Deepening Communications Resonance, available to MLC members here.

I see a blind spot for client-side folks–we think about the agency as an institution, not a collection of smart, creative workers.  You can bet that, just like the agency business itself, the staffers on your account are poking around for new job leads, too (at least the best ones probably are); it’s natural, but it costs you money and time when the best staffers leave.

Don’t leave this to the agencies to manage without your input.  With all the pressure we’re putting on their margins, there’s no guarantee they’ll do what’s best for their staffer’s compensation.

I usually talk about this issue in terms of motivating individuals, rather than retaining individuals on your account; but it’s really two sides of the same coin. The important question is how can you get individuals in an agency to give you their discretionary effort? You know they’re going to put in the hours, but how do you incentivize them to go the extra mile for your account, find that next great media/creative idea, take that little step to make it easier for partner agencies to work with them?  Essentially, how do you motivate the kinds of behavior you’re trying to get out of agency staff rather than just use rewards as a “thank you” for good work?  

Whatever lens you use – retention or motivation – here are two ideas as food for thought:

1. Non-Compensation: Use career/professional development as an incentive to agency staff.  One company I’ve talked to names its top agency staffers and takes an active hand in shaping their development, making sure they get challenging projects, exposure to senior client-side executives, rotations and interactions with other agencies, and involving them in what normally would be client-side training opportunities.

If you do this, work with the agency leadership, of course, and be sure to discuss whether you let the staff know they’ve been put on a special list – you may think it’s too risky to create an “elite” group inside your agency.

2. Compensation:  For some of its largest initiatives (e.g., Olympics, World Cup), Coca-Cola used a new agency model dubbed the Red Lounge (for its Olympics efforts in China) to break down silos between agencies.

For the ‘08 Olympics, a separate incentive structure was established for this agency model. Coca-Cola created a discrete bonus pool for Red Lounge, which was allocated to the home agencies (not directly to Red Lounge staffers) who then determined how to best distribute the incentives. The only rule was that all of the money had to end up in individuals’ pockets, not the agency’s.

I’m sure motivation came from multiple factors here (e.g., working on the Olympics…in China…for a brand like Coca-Cola) but it’s a fine illustration of indirectly influencing individual compensation.

 MLC Members:  See the full case study on how Coca-Cola creates a distinctive, compelling work environment to capture the commitment of individuals on their account.  Or listen to the webinar replay.