Idea Bounty, new WWF crowdsourcing fair partner ?
Idea Bounty is a new platform developed by Quirk eMarketing , a marketing agency based in London, Cape Town and Johannesburg and it’s about to buzz.
After BMW, Levi Strauss and Redbull, WWF is now currently using the platform to hire “1000s of creatives” and regenerate their marketing materials by sourcing new outputs directly in consumer’s minds. A reward from 1000 to 5000 $- call it “Bounty”- is offered for the Idea that best fits with the brief. Contributions are textual only and can be either new mottos, paragraphs (eg website presentation) or sketches… It could be worthwhile to see how these new ideas have been implemented so far but unfortunately portfolio is not included on the website.
Idea bounty (IB) is not really precise about how large is the community but to make it growing fast, IB spreads some talent and offers to pay 10% of the “Bounty” if one of your friend invited on the platform, has a winning Idea! Other sign of distinction, IB community seems mainly constituted by African up and coming agencies like Urbian who won BMW contest. Like another evidence, the platform is also linked to Muti “a Social bookmarkting site dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa”
So, what are the advantages for the client? As the website answers, “If you truly wanted to inject the new energy and diverse thinking (Ideas) of hundreds of hungry experts, the costs would grow exponentially with Idea Bounty you have access to all the Ideas you could possibly imagine but you only have to pay for what you like – or only one!, we should better say-. Looks like Idea Bounty bet on “low cost R&D” arguing.
Key point is how ideas can be protected? As Copyright law states, ideas themselves are not capable of protection and in this case we can’t see what could really prevent brands to take advantages of ALL ideas they have received all their year long campaign.
Not really fair you think? In FAQ, IB kindly prevents you “If you believe your Idea is worth $10,000 and the Bounty is $1,000, then you should not submit your idea”… but risk of desertion seems to be limited: like Gary Willmott, enthusiastic BMW contest Winner, says “It’s not often you win 3k in Dollars! Which is pretty neat with South Africa’s exchange rate.”
Do WWF think about these considerations? Time to invent user generated advertising fair trade huh?
30 July 2009 at 9:18
Hey Elie,
Thanks for the coverage - always nice to come across people chatting about and engaging with Idea Bounty.
Just to clear a few things up that you mentioned in your post. Firstly most of the submissions we receive are written but we do give the option for you to upload anything from short videos to PDFs and power point presentations - I think the important distinction to make here is that we are looking for an idea and not a finished bit of work - we try and give you as many ways to express your idea as possible. It is interesting to note that some of the ideas that have won in the past have literally just been a five line paragraph explaining an idea.
We would also love to let you all know what the winning ideas are - unfortunately we cant do this until they have been implemented by the brands that have paid for them. We will be letting you all know when this happens, I know Red Bull is due to roll out the idea they bought soon.
If you were wondering about our community - currently as of this morning we have 3680 registered creatives, we grow by about 10-15 a day. The majority of our creatives come from the USA, Europe and South Africa (in that order) overall there are over 50 countries that are represented by our creatives.
We also do absolutely everything we can to protect a creatives IP, when you register you are required to enter some of your personal details. These details are then used to time and date stamp a submission - essentially marking it as your legal IP. If you have the winning idea the client pays for for it (the bounty) and both parties sign a legal assignment agreement which transfers the IP from the creative to the client. Obviously this also means that if you ever see a campaign that looks suspiciously like your idea that you have not been paid for, there is our legal frame work you can fall back on. If you would like to read the legal agreement you can view it here - http://www.ideabounty.com/license-agreement
So far we have hosted a total of six briefs and awarded 6 bounties - our winners have come from the UK, France and South Africa. I think the single most important thing about Idea Bounty is that its about the ideas and not developing or researching a product. Most of our briefs are marketing or communications problems - something that we believe anyone regardless of their profession can work on and have brilliant ideas/solutions that then can be developed future into a campaigns or execution.
Thanks again for the mentions - if you have any more questions please shout.
Cheers,
Dan
Idea Bounty Captain