Crowd-sourcing for Ketchup
Crowd-sourcing is being utilized again by our advertisers, this time for the next great Heinz commercial. Starting August 27th you can vote online for your favorite from a group of 15 finalists, all hosted on YouTube. As with the Doritos piece, the caliber of some of the work is quite impressive. Of course, with the nearly 4000 entries, it’ll be tough going wading through tons of real stinkers. I wish the judges good luck and good speed in narrowing thousands down to the top 15!
The advent of user comments may make it easier to find and qualify the jewels, but given that the best comments will come from the most-connected submitters, it may boil down to a popularity contest. Despite the hopes for the great media democratization that the web provides, it’s still marketing and promotion that’s king. It just looks different now than ten years ago.
$57,000 for the winner? That’s a real bargain for Heinz. Near-infinite proposals, cheap labour, great content, Darwinian selection–it sounds like Nettwerk CEO, Terry McBride’s prediction at the VIDFEST 2006 keynote that the creative services will be crowd-sourced within 10 years is coming close to fruition (a prediction for which the keynote crowd itself was quite vocal over in the extreme negative)!
But getting back to Heinz, this is one of my favorite entries:
