Peperami – nasty food, great marketing – has joined the ’crowdsourcing’ bandwagon and managed to upset London’s creative agencies in the process. Unilever, the brand owner, has parted company with Lowe London – Peperami’s agency for the past 15 years and the creator of the ‘bit of an animal’ icon – and instead offered a prize of £10,000 to the creative team that comes up with the best executional idea.
The discussion forum on Campaign Live blog is worth following, as it crystalises the debate surrounding this type of initiative – is it an innovative approach to marketing or a cynical attempt to get creative work on the cheap?
Although the Unilever spokesperson claims that the winning idea could come from a “plumber from Barnsley”, the fact that the contest is being run through an online community for creatives (ideabounty.com) suggests that Unilever wants to attract entries from professional creative teams. The company is also promoting the competition on the freelance recruitment sections of the major advertising and marketing blogs, which is a smart move.
Creative agencies should be concerned by this development. They are already over-reliant on freelance talent and clients have realised that they can access great creative thinking, without paying expensive agency overheads. This makes even more sense when, as is the case with Peperami, there is an existing creative idea that simply demands new executions. Why pay for planners and account handlers when most of the strategic thinking has already been done?
Nic Ray, speaking on behalf of the freelance creative community, underlines why Unilever’s initiative is so smart: “I feel compelled to point out that almost all agency creatives work on freelance briefs outside of their normal employ – and get paid substantially less than $10k for doing so. Here’s a opportunity to work on one of the UK’s most iconic \(and irreverent) brands, pull out those brilliant back draw ideas that were never sold and have some fun shaking up the industry in the process.”
2 Comments
I notice you refer to how they “managed to upset London’s creative agencies in the process”. Perhaps if they had considered some of the (cheaper) but no less talented agencies in the North, they wouldn’t have felt the need to do this…
…a plumber from Barnsley indeed…I am shocked that Unilever have managed to get this so dramamtically wrong. How can you crowdsource something from what is (as you say), effectively a creative community website?
Why didn’t they create an application on Facebook for example? In fact, Unilever, drop me a line. I’m based in The North – i know, but I will travel if that scares you
and we can talk about how you can achieve the same effect and have your ideas developed from the very people to whom your product is aimed…rather than the creatives who would eventually execute that idea anyway…
Love Paul
I quite agree that what Unilver is presenting as ‘crowdsourcing’ is simply a way of sourcing cheaper creative work from under-employed creative teams. Hopefully they will take you up on your offer.