A TV company is turning to the crowd to find ideas that “appeal to the Y Chromosome”. The brief is live on creative crowdsourcing site Alternativegenius.com and shows the increasingly serious use of idea competitions in more sectors. (They don’t want to tell you who they are yet, but the £5000 prize shows they mean business).

Crowdsourcing has been around longer than most people realise – The Longitude Prize was a reward offered by the government via the 1714 Longitude Act for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. Useful at the time when getting lost at sea was generally fatal. The French government also created Montyon prizes to reward poor Frenchmen for virtuous acts. Read more »

I’ve been banging on for ages about how the
model of online advertising (where ads are served dynamically) will eventually apply to all
media, as the technology gradually enables it. And just like that, the future
according to Sky is here.

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Here’s Yahoo on YouTube (oh the irony) explaining the deal, cleared today by the EU Competition Commission. 

And here’s the note from Microsoft explaining the benefits. The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between
our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers
and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in
speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience,
as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve
monetization for partners. 

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Sick as I am of the hype around the iPad, you’ve got to admire the Apple publicity machine. And now the magazine publishers will be getting in on the act with, no doubt, rather clumsy versions of the paper editions, faster than you can say “hold the front page.” Because now you can, literally. Take a look at Wired’s versioning efforts on this neat film and see what you think.

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Long awaited changes at the top of McCann. Congrats are due to Nick Brien for being at the front of the jostling queue to take over from the immutable John Dooner, who has finally announced his retirement after 40 years in the business. 

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Bloody hell, a month goes by, and China and Google
split up. That particular debate centres on how
national governments interfere with cyber communities for their own,
possibly nefarious, ends. Not new, and we should pay attention to it here. Censorship is creeping
back in many Western countries as well as being sort of expected in
what we rudely describe as the ‘less democratic’ world.

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When Morrissey sang “some girls are bigger than others” was he singing about their size or their generosity?

Talking of size, there’s been a lot of talk about the death of the network agency recently. Amusing though Sir Martin Sorrell’s denouncement of his own agencies’ leadership at AdTech was (for the record – he reminded us that too many of his agency top management knew too little about digital) it can only be part of the picture. Digital isn’t the only thing many of them don’t get. Now I’ve always talked about the creative product, and how to encourage a better version of getting it. This is a common principle that unites many across the industry. Sadly there aren’t many large agencies that think it that important in practice, and would rather run and hide than get an honest debate about agency added value out on the table.

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Recent events in the idea crowdsourcing world herald a new business model for agencies. As the person responsible for putting Peperami on the internet in the first place (peperami.com 1996 for the historians amongst you) I’m well placed to comment on the recent move to find ideas using the internet. And as Jon Winsor and other (about to be ex-Crispin Porter) colleagues have announced in the early hours of this morning, it’s time for a new model that takes crowdsourcing to the next level. And that involves asking you, the creatives out there working for other agencies, to contribute to their briefs. Transparently. And at your risk.

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Being able to laugh at yourself is an important part of social media etiquette. Last night the London Twestival
event took place at Vinopolis, where twitterers from politics,
investment, media and music come together in support of charity. It’s a
global event, a great show and a true demonstration of the need for
people to combine their social computing habits with the human need to
congregate, chat, drink and be merry. And in the morning, as this report shows, we find a little time for diversity and amusement, as this report shows. 

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