As Halloween has come to a close, so has crowdSPRING’s DIY Face Makeup Designs for Halloween Kids project with a staggering 698 plus entries of which three winners were announced!
Crowdsourcing has long been a tactic marketers have used to engage customers. From running competitions in which the company runs winning ads to hosting online communities focused on product development, many marketers have found this approach compelling and cost effective.
Mike Samson, co-founder of CrowdSpring, an online marketplace for creative services, offers his company’s story as an example. CrowdSpring built and launched a website, but it couldn’t fully scale its operations as traffic and registration increased. The site was slow and sometimes crashed. People were frustrated.
Taking crowd-sourcing to the design and branding realms, this is a great site if you’re looking to build a design portfolio … not so much if you want to make money. Designs are submitted to each proposal and while payment for the design winner is guaranteed (and sometimes the runners-up get prizes too), with more than 100 entries on average for each project, competition is stiff.
Part three of a three part series. Clients want creative, innovative ideas that challenge the norm, and while we can always develop ways to connect with target audiences, few PR professionals have meaningfully pushed the limits. The result? A real disconnect on what works versus what we would like to work, or what we think will work.
Second of a three part series. In addition, the traditional way of doing PR and advertising is eroding. ROI and measurement are taking center stage, and there is a disconnect between what we believe will work and what actually does work.