Crowdsourcing... or just crowd pleasing?

Levi Roots hasn’t done badly for himself. Since his appearance on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den in 2007, his Reggae Reggae Sauce is available in all the big supermarkets as well as Wetherspoons pubs, and he’s got his own TV show on Caribbean cooking.

But the dragons cheated a bit on this one. The point of Dragons’ Den is supposed to be to pick out people with great business ideas and potential. All they did with Levi Roots was cash in on the primetime TV exposure. However tasty it is, would Reggae Reggae Sauce have made it on to the supermarket shelves without Levi’s TV appearance? Mediawatch doubts it.

It’s a similar story when you look at high profile examples of crowdsourcing. Millward Brown’s Nigel Hollis (from whom we admit to having half-stolen the title of this post) has been blogging about the technique entering the mainstream. But how often is it just an attention-grabbing gimmick? Crowdsourcing exercises so often involve high-profile calls for action that it can be difficult to tease apart the effect of the publicity you get when you loudly ask for the public’s views, and the value of the ideas that they actually come up with (compared to what ad agency creatives might have managed).

Unilever has ditched its ad agency of many years and turned to crowdsourcing site Ideabounty to find the idea for its next Peperami ad. More than 1000 entries have been received, and here we are writing about it before the idea has even been decided on. Of course, engaging the public is all part and parcel of how crowdsourcing works, but Mediawatch wonders whether, when the brands involved have enough clout to rely on getting some coverage and attention, the search for ideas is really an afterthought.

Most suspicious of all is the tale of Kraft’s new Vegemite variant, Cheesybite, which started out with the silly name of iSnack2.0 – supposedly crowdsourced from entries to a competition. The name was then ditched with much fanfare and replaced by Cheesybite, which came out of an online vote.

Since nobody in their right minds would call a product iSnack2.0 unless they were joking, we can take this to be a very successful publicity exercise. In a conversation between some Australians (the main – or perhaps only – target market for Vegemite) overheard by Mediawatch this weekend, there was much talk of Cheesybite, focusing mostly on the naming controversy rather than the merits of the product itself. Could Vegemite’s marketing team have come up with as good a name by themselves without all this hoo hah? Of course they could have. But (as the Google Trends results for Vegemite testify) they wouldn’t have got anything like as much publicity.