We know crowdsourcing in general is still unfamiliar territory for many out there, and we want to change that. We’re devoting a blog series over the next few weeks, each one focusing on a phase of the video campaign planning process. If you want the Strategic Guide to Crowdsourcing a Video Campaign in its entirety, visit www.geniusrocket.com/whitepaper to access the online and pdf version.

Whether you choose us or another agency, these pointers should help you execute your campaign with confidence. Ultimately, we want you to maximize the power of the crowd and nail your business objectives with an outstanding video campaign.

Our blog coverage today: Creative Partner Assessment

Stage 2: Choosing Your Creative Partner

In our previous blog post, we covered the importance of establishing business objectives and performance metrics before launching a video project. Once this is completed, your next step is determining which agency will best help you accomplish those goals.

In some instances, it makes sense to stick to the traditional route you’ve been sticking to, while in other cases it behooves you not to take advantage of crowdsourcing. It is important to recognize there are differences amongst crowdsourcing agencies. There are two major operating models:

Open or contest-based crowdsourcing models put your creative brief, style guide and brand assets onto an open social platform for anyone to access. While this may yield a broad array of creative choices, it leaves important brand assets outside of your, or the agency’s, control. Open crowdsourcing models also lack any quality assurance opportunity. Once the creative brief is released, the brand and agency have limited or no interaction through the production process.

Closed or curated crowdsourcing models offer a more closed environment with a creative community that is vetted and professional. A professional community leverages the quality of the members over the quantity, and reduces creative concepts deemed inappropriate or off-message. Incremental steps for concept evaluation and testing provide the benefit of the crowdsourcing ideation phase. This phase also provides brands with the quality assurance and security they require. You should expect a crowdsourcing agency, with appropriate QA controls, to execute work at least on par with any traditional creative agency.

If you are evaluating which agency to choose, it can be very useful to do a side-by-side analysis. We’ve provided the following Shaded Analysis and Opportunity Cost and ROI Evaluation grids to help you prioritize your video needs and rank the agencies.

Shaded Analysis
To use the grid effectively:

1. List the qualities you’re looking for in your agency
2. Rank them in priority
3. Color each agency you’re considering according to how you believe they fare on that quality (ranking categories to the right)
4. Assess overall strengths of each agency when finished

Below is an illustrative example of what a finished grid could look like:

Opportunity Cost and ROI

It can be very compelling to assess what residual budget you can expect from each agency that you are considering. You can evaluate how to allocate those extra dollars to other aspects of your marketing campaign.

Estimating ROI can be challenging since you won’t know how the video impact will differ across agencies. However, if you make a basic assumption that the return on the video campaign will be similar across agencies, you’ll quickly see how the ROI will be significantly higher through a crowdsourcing agency because of the low cost of investment.

Of course, there are a host of other factors that will influence your decision on which agency to choose, such as client portfolio, quality of the creative community, and service reputation.

In our next blog post, we’ll provide guidance on how you can maximize the power of the crowd to get the creative concepts you’re looking for. Stay tuned! (Or… just go to www.geniusrocket.com/whitepaper where you can access the entire guide at once)

Do you find these grids useful as you explore which agency to choose? What are some tactics you utilize? Share them with us in the comments below!

_______________________________________

Read previous post:

Crowdsourcing a Video Campaign Stage 1: Defining Business Objectives