What do you see when someone asks you how marketingcampaigns are created. Creative people doing all kinds of stuff to get inspiration. Locking themselves up in an office, taking a walk or just going to a bar for a drink and look around? That is a common image. An image that can change quickly in the near future. We all can think about campaigns, crowd-sourcing is the new game.
Unilever plans to expand its use of crowd-sourcing to create more relevant marketing campaigns for all its brands. A partnership with eYeka will see the co-creation platform based in France use its online community to develop new campaigns for the FMCG giant across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Russia and South Africa.
Rahul Welde, Unilevers vice-president (media) for Asia, Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Russia told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the company intends to engage more fully with its most creative consumers. The objective is to build a great creative product working very closely with Unilevers agencies, and create a stronger ecosystem and platform, he said. Ultimately, this agreement will accelerate the development of a culture of co-creation and collaboration that drives innovation and creativity, he added. For eYeka, crowd-sourcing can give major brands a considerable competitive advantage by turning to consumers for ideas. Francois Petavy, CEO of eYeka, said: Brands and their agencies are opening up to creative ideas from more diversified sources such as communities of consumers. We believe in a new open model where brands and their agencies collaborate with consumers and other non-traditional players on a sustainable basis, he added.
Petavy argued in a recent blogpost that crowd-sourcing was an idea whose time had come and it was set to take off in 2013. He said it was capable of solving real business problems and that ROI could be demonstrated.
And the Innovation Excellence website listed six partnerships, including the Unilever-eYeka agreement, that it said proved that crowdsourcing was going mainstream.
The others included Deloitte and Kaggle, Sony CEA and Mofilm, Edelman and Poptent, Booz Allen Hamilton and Innocentive, ADK and eYeka.
