The latest and finest in crowdsourcing

Back in March, I published my first post on crowd-sourced advertising. My focus then was on Ford and Coca Cola’s novel efforts in co-creating advertising campaigns and branded content with their respective target audience.

I am pleased to say that since a few more advertisers have come out of their shell, gone the extra mile to successfully evolve (if not reinvent) the crowd-sourcing game with their consumers. Here are those that have stuck with me specifically.

In July 2013, Lexus released its LexusInstafilm.

In a nutshell, the advertiser invited 212 instagrammers to collaborate on the shoot of a promotional film for its 2014 Lexus IS model. The film was to consist of instagram shots only (all individual shots can be seen here). The shoot was planned like a military operation, with nothing left to chance, as the video below shows.

This was a one of a kind opportunity for the Lexus car lovers, creative types and Instagrammers who were lucky enough to be able to participate into the making of an ad for a brand they admire and aspire to.

Incidentally, the making of the film and final output are brilliant pieces of advertising for Instagram also – which makes me wonder what their contribution to this project might have been in $ or otherwise…

In August, Nissan’s #JukeRide project took crowdsourcing to a new level by inviting motorsport enthusiasts and social media fans to help co create a new car focused on improving the performance of Nissan’s Nismo team of drivers.

Ideas for new car features were captured via social media and also in person via brainstorms with ex-Formula 1 driver & brand ambassador Johnny Herbert and his team of engineers. In the end, more than 3,000 individual ideas were contributed to the #Jukeride product by over 1,000 fans. A social experiment that ladders up wonderfully to Nissan’s tagline: Innovation that excites.

Harley Davidson is notorious for pioneering crowd-sourced advertising. A few years ago, with the help of a crowd-sourcing specialist agency, it launched its Fan Machine – a Facebook app that crowd-sources campaign ideas from the brand’s fans. Its 2012 ‘Stereotypical Harley” campaign was one of the successful outcomes. Recently, they revealed they had extended their crowdsourcing strategy to product development with Project Rushmore. Their latest range of bikes is the result of a collaboration with riders and fans of the brand, as reinforced by the “Built by all of us. For all of us” tagline.

Lastly – my 2 favourites:

The award-winning “Perfect Lager Project” – a product launch campaign for winemaker Casella Wines that kicked off without the product per se. The campaign idea was indeed to use crowdsourcing to identify what made the perfect beer from Aussie beer lovers, which Casella would then brew for them. This was a clever way of standing out from the fierce local competition and overcoming the winemaker’s late entry to a very crowded market.

And –

As part of its Hollywood & Vines campaign, Airbnb has just released a short film made entirely of crowd-sourced vines – a first in the art of film-making. 750 viners participated by submitting their selected shot via Vine and Twitter (nice corporate tie-up here); 100 vines made it to the final cut that screened online and on Sundance channel.

This is how it all started:

The end result is truly magic, beautifully stitched together and a real prowess considering how challenging the app’s time constraints can be.

Given the diversity of crowdsourcing initiatives (from co-creating a car or a bike through co-brewing a beer to co-making an ad, a film or a song), it makes me wonder:

Is there anything that can’t be crowd-sourced these days?