Why crowdsourcing is rubbish : "We know it when we see it"

Tom Albrighton at abc copywriting has put up a well researched piece explaining all the faults he sees in crowdsourcing. Beyond the obvious "can we do the font from that one, the headline from that one, and the picture from that one?" thing we've all run into when we present three pieces to more than five people.

You only hear what you want to hear

Any agencies or creatives who have presented ‘options’ to a client will know all about the way the consultation process is closed down and stage-managed. While the options are ostensibly equal, there is always one that the creative prefers. Often, one or two will be complete no-hopers, in there to make up the numbers. Sometimes, there’ll be a totally off-the-wall option, inexorably destined to be earnestly discussed but ultimately rejected.

The whole exercise is designed to give the client an impression of due process, and stress their own personal importance and involvement, while gently shepherding them towards a predetermined outcome. (Sometimes I wonder if the clients actually know this, deep down, but play along anyway for the flattery.)

The point is that it’s impossible to avoid bringing your own agenda to the consultation, even if unconsciously. The options on the table, the phrasing of the questions, the format of the survey – it may look balanced and scientific on the surface, but it can’t help but reflect your own idea of what’s right.

You end up imposing your own ideas

Thanks to social media and the web, the ritual of presenting options to the client has mutated into a monstrous and dangerous new form: completely crowdsourced creative.

Instead of badgering their creative agency into producing one good design and four pointless alternatives, the client can just go straight to 99 designs and get 500 rubbish designs to choose from – at a fraction of the cost.

Since the designers involved are paid little or nothing, their submissions are severely compromised in terms of commitment, time and ideas. So instead of buying one great idea, the client gets lots of weak ones through which they can enact their own taste and control-freakery. Crowdsourcing design means buying lots of rubbish little dogs and barking rubbishly yourself as well.

The mindset behind all this is puzzling. I guess we could sum it up something like this: ‘I know I can’t do this myself, so I need someone more creative to do it. And although I trust them to produce the ideas, I don’t trust them to choose the best one – I’ve got to do that. And even though I wouldn’t have any idea how to proceed when faced with a blank page, I’ll know the right answer when I see it.’

You can’t judge quality as well as you think

‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ Will you though, really?

Buy the Arden edition of Macbeth and read the footnotes. You’ll see scholars who spent their lives reading Shakespeare arguing over what he meant to write, in cases where the original text is unclear. Although we know that a line of Shakespeare is genius the second we read it, we probably couldn’t pick it out in a beauty parade of similar lines.

The classic case in point is the saga of the Gap logo. Having (wrongly) caved in to social-media pressure over its new logo, Gap opted for crowdsourcing – before descending into uncertainty, bottling the whole thing and keeping their original. It was excruciating to see a company that had been brought to its knees by feedback going back for more, looking for yet more content when what they needed was clarity.

The lesson is clear: choice brings uncertainty. You need to reduce options, not proliferate them – throw away the bad ideas and get to the good. Anyone can casually throw out another possibility, particularly when they’ve got nothing to lose. Genuine creatives pick one winner and back it all the way. For better or worse, they commit themselves in a way that survey respondents or crowdsource participants just don’t. And only commitment gets results.