I'm going to wait and see what everyone else thinks about this.

Totally agree with you.

Consumers won't care in the slightest who wrote the ad, especially when it looks like an ad that could have come out of any big shop.

I can only guess that Unilever saved money taking this route rather than staying with Lowe.

Peperami seem confused to what they have here.

Matt Burgess, Peperami managing director, said: "Peperami is a brand which is bold enough to experiment with new ideas and advertising techniques in an increasingly consumer-driven world.

A 30" TVC like thousands before it is not a new idea, not a new advertising technique nor is it consumer driven.

It seems to me that although the benefits of crowdsourcing are questionable the real problem here is how Peperami framed the brief. Instead of asking people to write an ad, Peperami should have put forwards a more open challenge:

We have £Xm to make more people buy Peperami. What should we do?

The answers to that challenge may have been a lot more innovative, original and interesting than the TVC they have today.

Absolutely. Crowdsourcing can be an interesting way of involving people in brands, but this is just freelancing.

As you point out, this isn't really crowd-sourcing at all. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely collaborative in the process used to come up with this cold rehash.

But it highlights a wider issue: Whether it's bandwagon jumping or faulty logic, crowd-sourcing is being recommended to clients as a potential solution to ideas-creation.

There is little doubt that crowd sourcing works in some situations. James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds documents several good examples.

But I think the mistake the industry is making with crowd sourcing (aside from jumping on it because it was the subject of a mildly successful business/popluar science book a few years back, and is therefore a "new idea") is to assume that because crowds are good at solving some problems, they can be applied to all problems.

The oft-quoted example of the group of villagers who correctly guess the weight of an ox when the average of their predictions is calculated might seem magical, but the key word there is average.

You can't apply this quantitative technique to creativity--as an industry we neither want, nor need average ideas.

100% agree. Brilliant post. Peperami is when this empty trend definitively jumped the shark.

This single ad alone will probably kill off Ideas Bounty as a business and crowd sourcing as a viable creative alternative. We should probably be thankful ;)

Crikey - who says advertising doesnt work - I have just read the posts above and I now want to try some viagra! Sheesh who could have spotted that. (this of course wont work when Richard has removed them).

Think there are some good points here, but perhaps worth bearing in mind that crowd sourcing doesn't necessarily have to mean total abdication of creative or strategic control. Let the crowd offer or provoke ideas, but don't use them just because they're there.

When you open up your fridge in the evening you don't necessarily make a meal out of all the ingredients in it, or the nearest ingredients - you pick the things that work well together. This is the same, it's just you've allowed a bunch of strangers to do your food shopping for you.

Moreover, crowd sourcing should just be part of the process, rather than all of it, as James H says above.

Agree on the ad though.