Crowdsourcing: What's your take on it?

by Craig Otto

I was just catching up on some reading. I came across an interesting article in a recent Adweek about crowdsourcing. The article describes how it’s being used by large corporations to solicit creative thinking on logos, packaging and marketing campaigns.

Supporters of the idea say that it’s better than responding to RFPs, because participants get to compete head to head purely on the basis of their craft. Detractors say it’s nothing more than a fancy word for getting speculative work, and paying little if anything for it.

What I find interesting in these creative crowdsourcing shootouts, is that no crowd is invited to decide which idea is best. This it would appear is the work of a select few.

To my way of thinking, having only a few decision makers pass judgment on the work of many flies in the face of crowdsourcing’s most fundamental tenet -that a large group of people is better than a single expert.

Thoughts?