Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

September 9th, 2009  |  Peter Scott

Speculative work (doing work for free in hopes of landing a job) and the design profession have met once again, this time with a fancy new name called “crowdsourcing” (seemingly coined by Wired Mag and now a Wikipedia entry). U.S. ad firm, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky crowdsoursed a logo for their client Brammo, a manufacturer of electric ‘powercycles’. Posting the job on crowdsourcing Web site crowdSpring they offered $1,000 to the winning logo design and received a huge number of entries from which to choose. A variety of blogs have taken up the discussion on the pros and cons of this new way to reach out to the masses for creative ideas. It is an age old dilemma and still seems to divide those of us who believe that to do the best strategic work for a client, you need thorough and thoughtful analysis and the group that believes more is better (and cheaper).