Looking to the crowd for ad inspiration
By Steve Mullins. Web wisdom. Tongal is leaning on the knowledge of many to get ads made. The US-based content-collaboration site only launched last month but already has a full pipe of sponsors lined up for this summer for a number of spots, music and instructional videos that will be made from ideas culled from a series of online contests powered by prize money.
James DeJulio, Tongal’s founder, is a firm believer in crowdsourcing – the idea that companies can successfully outsource some of their tasks to a group of people to tap the collective wisdom – being able to produce content quickly and efficiently, in a way that movie and TV makers simply can’t.
“I came out of the feature-film businesses and saw the inefficiencies,” he tells brand-e.biz. “There has never been a single thing created by one person. It’s always done with a community of people, with creators continually looking for feedback. And filmmaking is probably the most collaborate effort around – to get from conception to the screen involves thousands of people.”
So, to tap into the collaborative effort, Tongal used the TopCoder community – a huge grouping of programmers – to develop its website from the ground up. “We were born out of TopCoder and built by crowdsourcing – the flash player, the design, the logo, the archictecture, everything,” DeJulio says. “ If people ask for proof of concept for crowdsourcing, then Tongal is it.
“And right now we are running a contest for our own tagline,” he adds. “We are asking people who use the site, the community, to tell us.”
And that community includes the likes of film directors and television writers, though Tongal is finding that these pros don’t necessarily have all the best ideas, that good concepts can come from any of the outfit’s members in 20 different countries.
And in the next few weeks the community will be turning its collective mind to the making of a pair of music videos. “One is for a major label, the other is for indie band,” says DeJulio. We will provide footage of the band in front of a greenscreen and let people do something with it.”
And he believes Tongal can deliver for advertisers on the cost as well as on the idea-generation side. “A very large alcoholic beverage company says it take their agency six months to get just five concepts, and then they need to spend millions of dollars on them. We can do things much more quickly and cheaply. A thirty-second ad costs about $500,000 to make and we can do it for around $5,000.”
So does the future of advertising lie with the crowd? “Look, we’re not replacing ad agencies,” DeJulio says. “This is complementary. And let’s face it, the agencies don’t want to be in the business of running online contests, do they?”
