John Winsor is badass

First and foremost, if you don't know who John Winsor is, here he is. If you've ever read my posts previously, I've got a deep interest/fascination with the crowdsourcing concept and John is one of my favorite forward thinkers in the space. He also works (err, worked) at CP+B, which is an agency I admire simply because they take risks and they push their clients to take risks.

I was at a local conference here in New Orleans this morning listening to a speaker and checking my iPhone's Twittelator app when I saw the following tweet posted by @AgencySpy.

"Crispin alums start their own shop, also in Boulder. It's crowd-sourcing
centric http://bit.ly/18qh7y"

My first thought was, well this can't be John Winsor because he just wrote a book with Alex Bogusky called Baked In, Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves. But low & behold it is John Winsor and I'm so psyched to see him pushing the envelope and taking a risk to see if a business grounded in the crowdsourcing idea can be successful long term. In one of my previous posts, I pondered whether there could be a day when a large majority of people are no longer employed by one employer, and instead are open for business to whomever is in need of our services, experiences, and expertise. John's new company, Victors & Spoils, appears to be provoking that concept even more.

So check this out, John's new agency is crowdsourcing their logo design on crowdSPRING - seriously badass - they're putting their money where their mouth is. If Victors & Spoils does this right, and I think they will, they'll be able to really drive down their operational costs AND their overhead, by crowdsourcing assignments. And then, just when you think they're starting to crack one of the nuts attributed to the high cost of advertising (media placements is one I'd love to see them tackle!), they leverage that same crowdsourcing model to determine whether the concept or design is any good. So, rather than having a bunch of muckity muck brainiacs who think they know what customers will want/like, they will use their crowdsourcing business model to drive closer to the right concept leveraging the collective voice of the customer. It's incredibly powerful stuff, especially when you're trying to convince that really intelligent client of yours that the direction they want is wrong.

This is why I follow John Winsor. He truly believes in the power of "we" to make a better decision than the power of "me". I'm really looking forward to watching how this unfolds.

Is web 2.0 the new black?

Funny, I was reading this article today because I'm a huge Raconteurs fan. When I came upon this quote -

"The placements in TV shows these days are about as big a thing as you can do anymore," says Chisel. "It almost is the new radio. It's the new way people are finding out about a lot of music. And there are a lot of really great shows like 'House' or 'Mad Men' or 'True Blood.' We were assured by the people that it was going to be a poignant moment. I was happy and felt like it advanced the plot. A lot of people heard the song and we see people almost every night that that's how they heard [of] us."

Which got me thinking... Is the internet replacing TV as the dominant communication vehicle? And if so, is every other channel below essentially dropping a level in stature? So, TV is now dropping to radio level importance; and radio dropping to print level importance and print dropping to... 8 track level importance (moderately kidding).

Just a thought I had.

When will executive salary's recalibrate?

With all the news about the jobless rate hitting 10% following closely behind the Forbes richest list, I can't help but wonder when these absolutely ridiculous executive salary's will level off and become more reasonable. Maybe I'm completely naive, but in my opinion, if these execs would reduce their salaries to something that is more in line with what they actually need to survive year to year, their salary sacrifice would enable those same businesses to hire back some of our unemployed. The have and have not divide is getting wider and wider right now. The entire economy is deflating -- how is it that executive salaries are spared?

Am I mistaken? Am I missing something obvious?

How fast is too fast?

In my new position working on the agency-side, one of my big assignments is to make things run more efficiently and my other big assignment is to identify a systematic way to enable this efficiency and to help us go faster.

Based on my 8 week observation, we move really fast. I actually have a completely radical idea for creating a system that helps us move extremely swiftly, but it could potentially have us moving so fast that the only thing slowing us down will be humans and I don't know how much faster I can make a human go (short of pumping them full of caffeine). So, I'm wondering what the ramifications would be to making the process and the system go that fast. As much as we all want to be able to multitask, the fact of the matter is it's really hard to do 10 of the same things at the exact same time. For example, if I have 10 things to be proofed by 1 person, that 1 person cannot physically read all 10 at the same time. The only solution is to add another body. Unless of course, I identify things that a computer could be doing before it goes to the proofer so the proofer isn't proofing quite as much - spelling could be proofed by the computer; tone of voice cannot.

If the system moved that fast, would the humans rebel? Will they start to shut down because there's too much pressure to keep up with the system?

Crowdsourcing continues to get more sophisticated

I'll write more on this later, had to throw it on here...

Checkout this article in the New York Times from September 2, 2009"Groupthink, Inc". It refers to Quirky.com; a phenomenal little business idea that allows anyone to submit their product idea for $99 with the chance of being picked by the crowd for further development.

What a cool idea!