Opening out co-creation
By Hugh Jordan. Campaign collaboration. “Co-creation has grown quicker than anything in the history of advertising,” says Gary Robinson, creative partner at London agency Farm, one of the founding members of the Co-Creation Hub. “That sounds like quite a grand statement but look at how quickly the whole social media phenomenon has taken off. Once a few case studies have come out and people can see the results, then there will be more interest.”
Still in its embryonic stages – the Hub only formed at the start of this year - co-creation has already been applied to communications, product development, even to politics. Nestlé and Unilever have both been impressed with results of their co-created campaigns. Surely it’s only a matter of time?
“Everyone buys a theory but it’s when more results are available that things really take off,” explains Robinson. “For Skinny Cow [for Nestlé] we prompted and dramatically raised awareness within a few months. Now big advertisers like the COI are interested.”
Co-creation engages the public through online discussion groups and face-to-face workshops, encouraging idea generation. Ideas with potential – “rough diamonds” – are selected by the agency, worked on and fed back into discussion groups for further refinement. It is a continuous, collaborative process, combining the strengths of crowdsourcing with the expertise of agency staff.
For advertisers involved in behavioural change, such as the COI, it is perfect. What better way of identifying how to change behaviour than by speaking to those whose behaviour you are trying to change? The proposition of co-creation is so simple, in fact, one has to wonder why larger agencies aren’t getting involved.
“Advertisers are quite conservative,” says Paul Cox, joint md at media planner, Opticomm, another member of the Co-creation Hub. “And that conservatism affects big agencies too, because big agencies tend to reflect what clients want. Once clients start banging on larger agencies’ doors it might spark a change.”
Robinson agrees.
“My guess is that larger agencies will probably start forming little silos within their agencies in the way that digital started. They’ll think: ‘there’s something going on out there and we don’t really understand it so let’s get a couple of those bods in and we’ll watch it grow’. Bigger agencies can’t turn around their structure as quickly as an agency of our size can.”
And the Co-Creation Hub has the advantage of being in the space first, of course. But it is the collaborative nature of the venture that really sets it apart. Farm, Opticomm and Face are all part of the Cello group, while thrudigital and Touch of Mojo are independents. The real-world equivalent of open-source software, anyone interested in co-creation, or with an idea of how to improve the proposition, is welcome to get involved with the Hub, be they creative, academic or entrepreneur.
“We have the planning and new product development side sorted,” says Robinson. “The communications and advertising side sorted, the media side sorted and now the design side too. And that’s a good package to start with. Now we say, how can we open this out further?”
