Commercials: Crowd-Sourcing Ads Such as 'Hands Off My Doritos' Threaten Advertising Agencies

March 10, 2010 — -- Remember the Doritos Super Bowl ad that featured a chip-craving canine forcing a dog collar on a human? Or the one where an obstinate young boy warns his mother's date to keep his hands "off my mama" and "off my Doritos"?

The commercials might have left you chuckling but many people in the advertising industry aren't sharing in the laughter. Both ads are examples of crowd-sourcing: The use of the Internet to broadcast an open call to a large group to work on a project with the winner being awarded the job by a company.

Crowd-sourcing started as a novelty but has grown into something much bigger and now threatens to further erode agency profits and undermine the traditional agency-client relationship. It has invaded the advertising space, with large companies such as Pepsi, Heinz, General Motors and Starbucks using crowd-sourcing. Doritos aired winning submissions in its ad-creation contest, including the dog and mama ads, on the Super Bowl broadcast.

As crowd-sourcing has evolved, it is now becoming a seriously organized threat to the traditional advertising agency. Late last year, Unilever fired advertising agency Lowe and opted to crowd-source its Peperami TV and print campaign with the promise of about $20,000 for the winning idea.

At first, crowd-sourcing was an innocuous way to generate buzz in the mid-2000s. Clients would ask consumers to create advertising for the brand. Tools such as cheap video cameras and YouTube facilitated consumers' creating some good but mostly poorly shot, dimly lit, low- to no-concept submissions. Heinz, Doritos and Chevrolet were early adopters.

In the next generation, clients and agencies used freelance professionals to submit ideas online for fees that were a fraction of the cost of traditional agencies and selected winners from the submissions. This model, being used in many fields such as science (citizen-science) and reporting (citizen-reporters) generated a lot of ideas but still required traditional agency help to refine, produce and buy and place the media.