Well, there you have it. I’ve moved from North Sydney to sunny, leafy Stanmore - not much difference apart from the array of delightful food and as the team from Zuni will testify, amazing dumplings.
I’ve been working at Zuni for over a month now and yes it has flown by - the usual agency stuff, pitches, creative reviews, processes, marketing, our website, blog, twitter and some client work thrown in there too and like any agencies, especially a new fresh out of the wrapper one like Zuni, this has been amplified ten fold.
But here’s were it gets very interesting, imagine as a creative director you didn’t have a team! Blind panic, no team! Yes no team as in physically any teams sitting in the office. No flashguns, creative teams, writers’, techy geeks and all the usual freaks you have in traditional digital agencies.
What if your ‘team’ was a collection of people handpicked who came from all over the world and they were experts within their discipline? Your job was to facilitate and guide the creative process. Yes that’s what CD’s are suppose to do but when you have the ‘team’ operating not just out of Australia but from all over the world, it puts a new perspective on it.
Exciting but bloody scary and from someone who came from a traditional above the line agencies through to traditional digital agencies with internal teams this is a totally new approach in managing a creative floor and yes in tweet world, many digital agencies who were the new guns in town are now seen as traditional agencies - how ironic.
To be honest I was spooked and something that really did rattle me around crowd sourcing was the quality of work and the perception from clients and agencies as a cheap way to get ideas, that’s something I really didn’t want to be a part of, thankfully nor does Zuni.
At Zuni we have been working to refine our platform and how we crowd source our work from a cost and bounty perspective to groups.
Some Zunified crowd sourcing approaches we are looking at:
We have a team here at Zuni with a tremendous amount of experience in their field. As a team we will review and hand select our own crowd - we will invite people we rate and have worked with in the past - encourage them to invite others – with a view to pay a fee for recommendations.
By crowd sourcing our groups into ‘clusters’ with grades and rates from creative concept thinkers, designers, technology, film directors, illustrators, graphic designers &, writers etc., will make the search process easier and more streamlined.
Allow a project to pay in phases rather than one idea with one final bounty payment., by breaking it down into phases throughout the delivery process we feel the work will be stronger as you have a specialist working at that particular phase.
Keep the crowd open at the start as ‘amateurs can bring surprises’ and filter towards the end of the process.
We will grow and reinvest in our crowd – by collating the best work that didn’t get made for one reason or another – and make it - all creative’s worth their salt want their work made. That way we’ll keep the quality and have the best people onboard.
Encourage your crowd to participate and review and over time facilitate meet ups, even hold events in different parts of the world.
Yes it’s different but the world is changing and many people are finding this approach a really effective way in working and in time this could become the normal way in working especially in the communications industry.
I would love to hear your thoughts or if you are interested in becoming part of Zuni’s crowd sourcing team then let me know via email: kevin.ferry@zuni.com.au or on twitter @kevinferry, and who knows you could be doing some great work and get paid well for your efforts
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