Day 2 at SXSW: Brand Fans, the New Brand Marketers – how tapping into the “creative genius” can take engagement to a new level

By Scott Woodhouse

Day two got off to a slow start after the previous night’s VICEMAG party, but “Brand Fans, the New Brand Marketers” – a panel about crowdsourcing – was a welcome distraction from a very sore head.

The panel bought together Frito-lay Senior Director Jen Saenz, PepsiCo Global Head of Digital Shiv Singh and Facebook Creative Strategist Kevin Knight – all heavyweights of the crowdsourcing game. From letting fans produce Super Bowl ads, to creating new flavors, to sharing ideas for funding, each of the panelists brought with them ideas and irrefutable proof of how tapping into the “creative genius” among DIY-inclined fans can take engagement to a new level.

Here’s what they talked about:

Crowdsourcing can help brands infect culture

If you ask Kevin Knight of Facebook, the best brands are the ultimate conversationalists – they get consumers talking, not just liking posts. “So many brands talk about to being a part of culture, but if you don’t bring your fans in – in a meaningful way – then you really won’t be a part of their life.”

He landed the point that everyone is their own brand these days, and peoples’ personal messages have a much bigger chance of making a connection than ours. Crowdsourcing is one way to harness the power of those personal messages.

Crowdsourcing and market research are becoming one

For Lays, campaigns like Do Us A Flavour and Crash the Super Bowl have unearthed deep-seeded consumer and product insights that they’d never been able to tease out using traditional research. “When you give people a forum to express themselves, you unearth things you never expected to find” – Jen Saenz, Frito-Lay.

The data that falls out of crowdsourcing at scale is immense. Lays now has granular data on peoples’ flavour preferences across different geographies, just as Pepsi has deep social data on what music people like to share – all insights they’re using in real-time strategies to serious effect.

Crowdsourcing leads to better marketing

It’s hard to quantify the direct effect of crowdsourcing on sales, but for Lays, Pepsi and Facebook, it’s much more strategic than the immediate campaign metrics. For them, crowdsourcing leads to better end-to-end marketing.

When it’s done right, with good measure of creativity you can’t deny crowdsourcing’s effectiveness. “When was the last time you went to store to buy 3 big bags of Lays at once?” – Jen Saenz. For Lays, crowdsourced flavours have created purchase magic previously not seen by the brand. Do Us A Flavour generated such traction that at one point Google was preemptively suggesting ‘Lays’ when people typed facebook.com into their browser.

Does crowd-sourcing undermine the skill of the creative agency?

Kevin Knight from Facebook believes that the strongest agencies are the ones who recognise that the structure of creativity has changed. “Nothing in communication should be a playbook, and you can’t just keep going back again and again with the same approach.” He believes agencies need to focus on being a bridge between brands and people – not being territorial about ideas.

“With Crash the Super Bowl, it’s not just about the TVC – its about giving people a stake – making them feel like they they’ve had a role in taking content to the biggest stage in the world.”

Of course, most of the blue chip agencies around the world still aren’t interested in community management – they’re still fixated on big, sexy TV spots. But Knight pointed out that the agencies that are in there every day at grass-roots level are the ones that will have the upper hand in the near future. “They’ll have better creative grounded in real insights rather than hypotheses”.

Crowdsourcing is one way to pull insights and ideas from large groups, but the skill of the agency remains in how these things are applied, designed and connected through. It’s about collaborative creativity – guiding fans without actually passing over the keys to the brand.

Maybe Steve Jobs was wrong

With all this talk about sourcing ideas from people, someone in the audience raised Steve Jobs’ quote – “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – to which Knight replied “well maybe Steve Jobs was wrong”. A brave thing to say in a room filled with fierce Apple loyalists.

I don’t personally side with either argument – more that brands and agencies need to balance what consumers say they want with the innovation we know they desire.

Mish and I saw a whole bunch of other stuff during the day – including sessons on digital storytelling, UX principles from Jim Henson and mobile commerce – but I’ve written too much, so will leave it for another time.

One last thing though. Mish saw what sounds like an epic keynote by Elon Musk, CEO at SpaceX. He explained that he always wanted humans to land on Mars and would be disappointed if it didn’t happen in his lifetime. So he did some research, decided that it probably wasn’t going to happen, and set up a company whose aim is to make it a reality. Wow. Go Elon.

Scott Woodhouse (above) is a planner and Mish Fabok is a digital producer – both are from Whybin\TBWA Group, Melbourne and both are in Austin to get serious about interactive, tacos and parties. Woodhouse is writing a daily SXSW diary exclusively for Campaign Brief.