Competition Platforms
Description
Ross Dawson:
'The principle of competitions is very simply offering a prize for the winning entry to a defined task.
Online platforms now enable competitions to be run for a wide variety of small creative tasks. These tap large crowds of providers from which the best work can surface.
Based on information contained in the brief, individuals enter the contest, get feedback from the client, and submit revised entries if they wish. The client then chooses a winner who gets a pre-defined reward. (In some cases runners-up are also given prizes, or a broader range or participants are given payment for participating. The client gets the design or new idea and owns the copyright.)
There are a number of web platforms that facilitate this process, with some of them focusing on one particular area such as graphic design, video production, or data analytics. The platform has a pre-registered crowd of workers, and also provides the technology that allows the competition to be run effectively."
Typology
Open vs closed contests
"Most platforms will allow you to declare whether the contest is open or closed. Open contests allow those entering to see each other’s entries and often the feedback others receive. Closed contests keep the entries private."
Discussion
"Using a competition platform allows especially smaller businesses to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas and approaches that may not be available in-house" ... it is usually "significantly less expensive than going to a traditional design agency for straightforward tasks such as product logo design."
However, "There are many in the graphic design community who refuse to participate in competitions and actively lobby against them. They believe that participating in competitions devalues the work of professionals because they are providing “on spec” work that they will likely not be paid for, as well as leaving them open to intellectual property theft."
For example: Sarah Sturtevant of Integrated Marketing Solutions posted a competition on Crowdspring, getting 122 entrants to compete for a $375 logo assignment. (p. 140, Getting Results from Crowds).
"Some larger competitions are still being run using traditional approaches where competitors deal directly with the client. However an increasing proportion of corporate competitions are shifting over to the competition platforms, as they can handle all the logistics required."
Examples
- Graphic design: 99designs, DesignCrowd, crowdSPRING
- Marketing concepts: Idea Bounty, BootB
- Music for commercial use: Minimum Noise
- Video production: Poptent, Brandfighters
- IT Projects: TopCoder
Source
The material above is sourced from Ross Dawson's book, chapter 18, Getting Results from Crowds