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By Robert
Cherry
In the near future, the Seed newsletter will be written by you. And you. And you. And you over there. Oh, and you. In fact, if pundits are to be believed and a current trend plays out to its projected conclusion, we may all one day have a hand in producing everything we consume.
It all started, as so many trends do today, on the internet. With the tools of production supplied by the likes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, consumers--tired of passively consuming and/or compelled to see their image in the reflection of the worldwide web--started creating their own media and sharing it online.
Sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Channel101 make it easy to share music, photographs, videos, blogs, and podcasts with peers and strangers alike, while Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, points to the possibilities of open-source collaborations.
“Wikipedia has roughly 50,000 contributors and more than two million pages in a hundred different languages,” Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose. “Surveys indicate that it’s as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, which means it has some errors, but the errors get fixed more quickly on Wikipedia because there are so many contributors.”
Pundits have now latched onto the trend in media as the wave of the future for all creative endeavors. “The next big thing is us,” “Time” magazine recently declared in a cover story on innovation. “Big, bold ideas used to come from small groups of experts. Now they come from you as well.”
Michael Nesmith--the film producer, father of music television, former Monkee, and, yes, Liquid Paper heir—has even challenged us to invent a name for this new creature.
“Has anybody ever put together a word that means producer and consumer at the same time?” he pondered in “Wired” magazine. “That's what's going to happen. We'll be both. We'll have the means of production and consumption under our own control. I can't imagine that being anything but good.”
So… prodsumer? Or conducer? Whatever you want to call it—this thing we’re reportedly becoming--marketers are already trying to harness the beast to do their bidding.
Adcandy, a New York-based start-up, solicits consumers online to generate slogans and brand names for its corporate clients. Companies such as Converse, Sony Electronics and MasterCard are encouraging amateur directors to submit ideas for commercials. And McDonald’s is holding “online auditions”—a.k.a. a promotional contest—in search of everyday people to grace its bags and cups.
Is the prodsumer a viable marketing tool? And if so, how will it affect product innovation? Hunter Thurman, Seed Strategy’s Director Of Strategic Operations, offers his thoughts on the future of this latest trend.
Do you think more products will be created by consumers for consumers?
I don’t call that a new trend, I call that entrepreneurship. Once someone creates a new product, they’re no longer a consumer, they’re an entrepreneur. People will always come up with new ideas. And a small percentage of those people will endeavor to follow through and actually manufacture something. And if they succeed, they’ll become a company.
Is there value in soliciting ad concepts directly from consumers?
Almost every person I talk to that’s not in the industry says something to the effect of, Oh, I thought I’d always be good at advertising because I can come up with really funny ideas. I tend to give our profession more credit than that. If you open it up to the public, there still has to be some sort of gatekeeper to manage the ideas and search for the ones that can carry a campaign.
Consumers are not idiots, however, they rarely understand the strategic objective that advertising is trying to accomplish. If we were just trying to make up funny stories, 30 seconds at a time, then great. But there’s a lot of smart thinking that goes into successful marketing—and there’s a lot of consumer backlash against ads that play to the lowest common denominator.
Can open-source collaborations work to innovate packaged goods?
Everyone has ideas that could potentially be a really big success, but how do you get that started? People on the internet can afford to exchange a bunch of ideas because they don’t necessarily have to take it anywhere. At a major company, at least one in five new products had better make a huge profit or the company is in trouble. When you’re accountable from a business standpoint, it’s a different ballgame. I think you’d burn a lot of daylight hoping for a consumer to nail it.
So is the future of innovation “us,” as “Time” magazine declared?
The writer from “Time” said it used to be a group of suits in a small room who decided what people wanted. But that’s really not the case. At Seed Strategy, for instance, we’re certainly not trying to create something and force it on the masses. A huge portion of our intellectual horsepower is spent trying to figure out how to engage the consumer. The industry is much more sophisticated than some give it credit for.
I think everything always comes back to basics. Our clients don’t ask us to come up with hilarious tag lines. They want to know where their brand will be in ten years. And I don’t think 100 million consumers can collectively provide that answer. You have to have an agenda, a focus, and an understanding of all the moving pieces. And part of our job is to help uncover what the consumer wants. The internet can help us do that, but it’s just another tool, not a solution.
Robert Cherry is a Senior Writer at Seed Strategy. As a freelance journalist he has contributed to “Rolling Stone,” “Entertainment Weekly” and Cleveland’s “The Plain Dealer.” Contact him at rcherry@seedstrategy.com.
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