At their eighth Insight Exchange, at the end of May this year, McCann set out to prove that trends are real and growing by revisiting eight trends presented over the past three years at its Insight Exchange to demonstrate how they have evolved.
Crowdsourcing was one of the most debated trends of 2009. The term crowdsourcing was first coined by Jeff Howe in June 2006. Today there are over 100 web sites on crowdsourcing.[1]
Being a distributed problem-solving and production model, crowdsourcing consists of a number of models namely crowdfunding, crowdcreation, crowdvoting and crowd wisdom.[2]
Rob Van Rooyen, executive strategic planning director at McCann, discussed crowdsourcing as a marketing idea and how it has evolved into new ideas such as crowdfunding. “Through collaborative efforts people are raising funds, usually via the internet, to support efforts they have initiated,” he explained.
For example, in February 2011 the idea of building a life-size monument of RoboCop in the city of Detroit was born (an idea that would normally NOT find any funding). By March 2011 a total of 2 718 people from all over the world contributed $67 436 to the cause. The statue will be installed at Wayne State University’s TechTown campus later this year.[3]
Why is this interesting for companies? Van Rooyen hypothesised that companies don’t necessarily have to build the idea or the event for their corporate social investment projects. They could rather be the facilitators/gateway that allow people to contribute to their cause.
As an example, instead of going out there and creating an event that say we want to host in order to raise money to save the children, rather say to people ‘this is how we are going to save the people are you willing to contribute?’
“Crowdsourcing is such a great initiative because it gives the power back to the people, to make things happen, and most importantly, makes it easy for them to act,” he concluded.
The Insight Exchange is an agency neutral platform for executives to share insight about and in the communications industry. It is an initiative on behalf of the industry and not a McCann tool. Attendance includes other communications agencies, clients, non-clients and even competing brands, all in the same room.
Luca Linder, McCann Worldgroup regional director: Latin America Caribbean/Middle East/Africa, said that this event is so unique with such value-add that he would like to see it replicated in other countries around the world.
[1] https://www.openinnovators.net/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/
