Let the Story Through

The best commercial tells a simple story. In the Mad Men days of advertising, hitting on the right story meant finding the ideal in-house account executive to research market trends, test ideas, develop strategies and pitch it all to a populace that waited to hear what the next new thing would be.

Very top-down and very yesterday, according to John Winsor, chief executive officer and co- founder of Victors & Spoils, the first creative ad agency built on crowdsourcing principles.

Sporting the tagline, “Power to the Brand, Power to the People,” Winsor’s new agency promises to get the right story by drawing from the best advertising talents in the global digital community, at a fraction of the big agency cost.

Crowdsourcing in advertising? Yes, really, Winsor says.

He is adamant that ad agencies today need to be more contextual, open and human. More bottom-up. Brands need to behave more like the local merchant—out in the fresh air, in the open market—face-to-face with customers, who in turn, will make their demands perfectly clear.

Traditional ad agencies just don’t know how to get there.

They stifle talent, Winsor says, burying it in 500-person operations that might have only twenty or so truly creative minds. And clients, who pay to maintain that entire big-house infrastructure, are feeling increasingly nervous about relying on the intuition of small creative teams at the top levels of these agencies. They want more input into their marketing campaigns and product designs.

The Internet changes the advertising game with its billions of stories and its savvy population of users, Winsor says. People want a voice in the design and distribution of the products and services they buy. Clients expect ad agencies to take advantage of this huge opportunity.

And to make things even more interesting—or more complicated, depending on how you look at it—the number of people with advertising skills continues to grow.

“We’re moving from scarcity to abundance,” Winsor says. “Everybody has the tools and the knowledge to create logos and videos, they have video editing capability—there’s so much out there.”

Winsor believes that big, publicly-held ad agencies will always have their “platinum” clients, but he thinks most companies in need of advertising just want good work for a reasonable cost. Victors & Spoils can launch a new project for a tenth of the cost of a traditional agency, he says, because it operates from a spare base while drawing from the creative energies of more than 1,200 advertising professionals. Clients pay for product, not overhead.

“All of the best talent in the industry is freelancing for us,” Winsor explains. “To me, that’s a radical paradigm shift.”

Selecting the best available talent through crowdsourcing allows agencies to meticulously design each project with seemingly unlimited resources. At the same time, freelancers enjoy matching their strengths to jobs that invigorate them. “People are stuck doing things they don’t want to do in big agencies,” Winsor says. “They want some kind of passionate outlet.” There is more play for intuition, more room for the unexpected when corporate constraints are lifted.

Hollywood transformed itself in the same way since the heyday of the studio, Winsor notes: “Movie studios used to contract with all the writers, producers and actors. They made one movie a week, but they couldn’t employ all those people, so it became more of a freelance game. Advertising is just going that way.”

All of this abundance calls for a different organizing principle, according to Winsor. He sees the need for a “whole new curator class” of people who sift through the information flowing across the Web. The curator becomes a lens through which to view it all.

“A curator is a creative director with an editorial role, a whole new kind of person who’s trying to make meaning,” Winsor says.

It all goes back to storytelling. And unlike the big ad agency of yesterday, a crowdsourced advertising platform gives clients an expansive field from which to pick their stories, to find the threads of meaning that distinctively represent them. It puts a more human face on the brand. It creates a community.

“That’s how human beings have been bonded together forever,” Winsor says. “We all have a mythology, and the stories that seem to work best are the ones that are simple and all-inclusive.”

And the best advertisers, he says, are like the best storytellers: they have a keen eye on what’s happening, they find the deeper meaning, and they build the story from there.