I'll take ideas for a thousand, Alex.
My grandfather used to say to me, “Ideas are a dime a dozen.” I don’t think either one of us realized that he was preparing me for the coming idea economy. And that the literal value of an idea might actually be that ten cents buys you twelve ideas.
In 1995, when I first heard about the coming idea economy, I was excited by a vision where the best idea always wins and my value as an “idea person” would go through the roof. The first time I ran into this was with a book by Rob Brazell titled, “The Idea Economy.” I don t think I read the book, but the title itself got me plenty excited. And why not? I had ideas. I had tons of them. I had so many ideas I would readily give them away. A person like me would do well in the idea economy, I figured.
I have always been and always will be a student of creativity and ideas. My belief holds that everybody is creative. The fact that in our industry we have a department called "creative" has always bugged me a bit, and I’m sure it bugs other people. But it still isn’t uncommon to hear from people, “I’m not creative.”
Bullshit.
We’re all creative. Maybe some of us are out of practice or maybe we’ve been beaten down by a misguided education system. NASA did a long-term study decades ago where they tested a group of Kindergarteners on creative problem solving. 95% scored in the highest quadrant. Then they came back and did the same test every year with the same kids all the way through high school. By the time these kids graduated only roughly 5 percent still scored as highly-creative problem solvers. So the ability to be creative is naturally in us all somewhere, and it can be unlocked again.
But the future is never what you expect it to be. As I imagined and hoped for this utopian society where everybody rediscovered their creativity, I never predicted the role that technology might play and certainly not its latest role in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Suddenly, it’s obvious that everybody does have ideas. Sure, there are some that are less g ood than others -- but there are many that are really good. Really, really good.
Cruise through mystarbucksidea.com and you’ll quickly realize the quality of ideas out there. I fully expected the crowd to suggest FREE COFFEE FRIDAYS! and then for everybody to vote for it as their favorite idea. Instead the crowd had really sophisticated ideas, and when they did suggest FREE COFFEE FRIDAYS! the idea was deemed silly with comments like, “We’ll never make money at that.” What did they mean “we”? These people don’t even work there. But you can’t tell that by the quality of the ideas and the vetting of those ideas.
When I look at this phenomenon and the qual ity of ideas that we’ve gotten from the crowd it’s a bit shocking, and, in some ways, scary. But any time something scares me it compels me to lean further into it. And as I come to grips with this idea that ideas are a dime a dozen and even good ideas aren’t much more valuable, it has me looking back at our own history with ideas at CP+B. As a person who has skulked through the halls of a lot of agencies, I’ve had the opportunity to see a great deal of dead work leaning against the walls. And even in the agencies that might be considered by many to be creatively challenged there was always brilliant work being boarded up. It just wasn’t being produced, and, in many cases, it wasn’t even being presented. I know because I always ask.
So if CP+B has been good at anything it hasn’t been coming up with better ideas. I think our ideas are very similar to what gets conceived pretty much everywhere. But when we’re good, and we’re not always good, it’s because we’re good at singling out the best ideas and getting them=2 0made.
That’s the piece that remains rare and valuable. Can you make your ideas come true? Can you manifest the best of your thinking?
Like most people, I have ideas all the time. Some might be things like a blanket with sleeves. For several years I’ve been thinking about a social network technology that would allow drivers to opt in and post where they were going with their vehicle while people who needed a ride could post where they needed to go. Since so many of us are going so many places in so many cars there would be an abundance of matches. So I had that idea and I would talk about that idea and I would even consider making that idea. But I didn’t.
Somebody else did and they now have a brilliant start up called Zimride. I imagine that thousands of people had that idea but only a small percentage had the ability to make that idea real. To those folks go the rewards and to the folks like me who merely had the idea goes nada. I hope they have runaway success at Zimride.
We recently crowdsourced a logo design for Brammo. They are a brilliant bunch of folks making electric motorcycles. We received over seven hundred submissions which I think blew everybody’s mind involved. But when I think about myself as a young designer who had to make up fake projects to work on anything remotely as cool as motorcycle company logo it makes sense. The idea that I could have access and an even playing field -- plus I could make 950 dollars more than the lady who designed the Nike logo -- would have had me designing in my sleep.
Some designers are obviously frightened by the current spectacle that is crowdsourcing, but as an optimist I think it will work out. I see several possible scenarios. The first is that this young micro-economy that is crowdsourcing evolves in the same way the off-line economy evolved. The designers with the most success begin to create tiers and depe nding on which tier the customers engage, the prices and fee structure changes with the level of quality. My guess is this will happen and different communities will develop different rules. Another and more radical change would be if the model followed more of what happened in Hollywood with scriptwriters.
In the 1930s and 40s there were huge buildings at the studios that housed all of the writers and those writers worked on salary to bang out all the movies. They made a salary, but it wasn’t very high and it wasn’t connected to the success of the film. Today most scripts are written on spec and then sold. A powerful writers guild protects the writers interest and insures that they get a piece of the back end. If the movie strikes gold the writer gets rich. A strong guild could transform design as well. Today, an illustrator who designs a cover for Time ma gazine is more or less happy with the fee. But if that cover design helps propel the highest newsstand sales of the year they don’t see any of that. We don’t feel bad about that but maybe we should.
What if the woman who designed the Nike logo had been in a union that insured that instead of a fee of fifty bucks, she received a royalty of a penny a shoe? I’m not great at math but I think that works out to about 20 million dollars in the last ten years alone.
Seems like we tend to be nostalgic about the past and fearful of the future. But each time the future actually arrives and becomes the present we feel like it’s just the way things should be.
Let the debate begin.
