brand-e

By Hugh Jordan. Community creative. All is not what it seems at Eyeka. The website- pronounced I-Ka- started life in France as an offering similar to iStock Photo. But over the last five years, its owners have evolved the proposition and now, with offices in Paris and Singapore already, and over 85,000 members worldwide, the newly opened London arm looks set to make a splash in the UK.
“Back then the [stock photo] product was very commoditised,” says Stephen Wise, md of Eyeka’s London operation. “Eyeka’s owners realised the value was in the community rather than the end-product. We have moved from a technological platform perspective to an interactive platform for brands and users.”
Animators, designers, filmmakers and photographers are among the creative types that make-up Eyeka’s community. The site has a distinctly social media feel compared to similar websites, with featured profiles, member interviews and links to creative portfolios, in addition to the inevitable content competitions.
More advanced than pure crowdsourcing, where brands tap a pool of creatives, Eyeka’s proposition goes beyond the initial competitions, offering its community to brands in more innovative and meaningful ways. Yet, although the website advertises its services as co-creation, there is not the evolutionary streamlining of ideas and manifold feedback loops one would expect.
“The community is at the centre of what we do,” explains Wise. “There are lots of different ways brands can interact with our community. The competitions we run can kickstart interest in a brand’s offline or broadcast campaign. [Brands can] use the community as a seeding point. They might re-direct our community onto a dedicated Facebook page, after the initial engagement. Every campaign is different.”
Eyeka’s model seems closer to one of ‘advocacy’.
While competitions attract creatives after money and exposure for their work, for Eyeka and its clients, it is not the winning but the taking part that counts. The more entrants, conversation and creative produced by each competition, the more traction clients’ campaigns gain in social media channels.
For sportswear retailer Footlocker, Eyeka ran the competition ‘Who loves sneakers the most?’ The community generated creative solutions, many of which ended up not only on Eyeka’s homepage but seeded across various social media sites, being watched and passed on by more ‘passive’ consumers.
Many of Eyeka’s competitions offer prize pots for the user who gets most friends to sign up to a cause or register with a website. Campaigns for Hotel Ibis and Coke also promoted advocacy, getting the community to respond to the brands in a different way, while an ‘insight-generation’ campaign for Reebok actually did follow the more traditional co-creation format.
Eyeka’s approach seems malleable. As Wise acknowledges, the website’s value to brands and agencies is its community – digitally active, creative consumers who can kickstart a social media ‘snowball effect’. Interestingly, Eyeka’s being more interested in the process than end-product puts it in a synergetic relationship with agencies.
“For an agency, Eyeka can be a useful tool to go alongside their campaign,” says Wise. “There are [crowdsourcing] companies out there competing with agencies, taking creative briefs that would otherwise have been produced by agencies. What we do is link brands agencies and our community together in a way that kick-starts engagement elsewhere.”