Crowdsourcing adverts

We had a mentor round at SCA the other week, who was starting up a website where brands could invite anyone to pitch creative ideas, and get paid if their ideas were chosen. Exciting stuff, although it turns out there is a site in America running along similar lines called poptent.net - it'll be interesting to see how they differ.

Here's an example of one of these crowdsourced ads, for Jolly Rancher by a director called Olivier Agostini.

There's a neat idea in there - that a crunchy outside and soft middle could be represented by a turtle. But after that insight, he lets logic go walkies and the ad descends into tedious "surrealism". It's also unclear whether the acting and editing were intentionally bad or not.

As Jolly Rancher are made by Hershey's, a giant in US confectionary, one can only assume that crowdsourcing an ad like this was more of a PR ploy than a serious strategy. Let's hope that our friend's as yet unnamed site will be taken more seriously in Britain.