Creative crowdsourcing community: Peperami turns to freelance community Idea Bounty for creative spark

Unilever brand Peperami caused ripples across the marketing industry when it announced last August it was severing its 15-year relationship with advertising agency Lowe in favour of a crowdsourcing strategy. And in April this year, the company announced it was putting briefs forward for 13 of its brands to filmmaking community Mofilm in a bid to source fresh creative content.

Matt Burgess, Unilever’s managing director for Peperami, believes that such communities can provide creativity on a budget. This approach has proved effective so far for Peperami, with a project via the Idea Bounty crowdsourcing platform producing a low-cost TV ad, which launches this week, and a press ad concept for next year.

Burgess says: “Unilever had been struggling with Peperami account fees as it was a small budget for a small brand. Crowdsourcing gives this brand a better chance to be on TV, as we may not have been able to afford TV through the traditional route. We took a risk, but we believed the vehicle for Peperami was so well defined as a character, that the brief we put out would suit more sets of eyes than just the few typical creative pairs. We’re lucky to have a brand that can lend itself to this type of thing.”

Idea Bounty has attracted a large number of people with a creative background in advertising. Indeed, Rowland Davies – who came up with the chosen Peperami TV ad concept – is a former agency creative who found himself unemployed last year.

Davies will now be listed as a “top contributor” within the community, along with copywriter Kevin Baldwin, who came up with the TV and print campaign.

Nic Ray, managing director for Idea Bounty parent company Quirk eMarketing, says the community’s functions are continually being developed to help brands foster the next big idea. Brands will soon be able to ask to connect with a particular member of the community, and they could also connect with the Idea Bounty’s top 100 contributors as opposed to sending something out to its entire network of 14,000 members.

Unilever’s Burgess says that while Peperami as a brand is committed to its crowdsourcing strategy, there are certain brands and briefs where this route would not be appropriate. The Peperami brief contained details of a new product, which Unilever was willing to risk being leaked via the community, but in other cases it would not want to take this risk, adds Burgess.

He says using a crowdsourcing community doesn’t necessarily make the role of the agency redundant. He says: “The only way to crack a brief would probably still be through the agency network and probably will be for many years.”

But many marketers will be tempted to employ the services of a creative crowdsourcing community to help them develop their campaigns. Despite fears that this approach could leave brands open to accusations of IP theft, the $15,000 prize money offered to the winners of the Peperami ad proves that you can foster creative ideas from such communities without breaking the bank. And that’s surely a risk that many marketers are willing to take to get their next big idea on a budget.