"obtain (information or input into a particular task or project) by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet" Oxford Dictionary

"In crowdsourcing, a community or 'crowd' - often organized online - is invited to participate in tasks typically completed by organizations or by specialists. A call to a crowd might seek to

generate a large volume of content, or to lessen the burden of a task by distributing it among many people. Those using crowdsourcing techniques assume that putting a problem to a large group increases the likelihood of generating an important innovation." Hana Shepherd, 2012

In 2012, crowdsourcing became really popular in marketing circles and with big brands.

Unfortunately, the campaign was a mistake and had a disastrous impact on social media. Indeed, the goal of the advertising was to promote jobs in America but Obama didn't offer prize money or payment for the winners of the contest.

Despite this, this type of crowdsourcing - user-generated advertising - delivered very creative and quality designs.

Greenpeace decided to target an oil company; they created a spoof Shell site http://arcticready.com/arctic to crowdsource environmental activism.

Unfortunately, this crowdsourcing project caused controversy as it appears to read "20020" rather than "2020". 

The crowd created some very funny advertising. Greenpeace reached their goal: they made people talk about the issues of arctic drilling. It was quite controversial though as Shell's reputation must have suffered from this crowdsourcing project. Moreover, Shell was quite powerless here. I don't think that they could legally attack Greenpeace for this. Or at least, they couldn't act immediately against Greenpeace to stop them.

Crowdsourcing allowed Greenpeace to generate ideas very fast about a hot topic. Indeed, Internet is very fast as content can be shared multiple times on blogs, on Twitter, Facebook , etc. It seems like a perfect way to get reactions as people like to express themselves on the web.

RT @nospec http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/artworks-submissionObama is now crowdsourcing a poster, about job creation. Irony.

Then, other people complained on the web that if Obama wanted to support American jobs, he should actually pay designers to do his campaign posters instead of using crowdsourcing as a free solution.

Below, you can see the website (in partnership with Artworks) which was created for the poster design crowdsourcing.

I think that when you use crowdsourcing, you have to find something that pleases the crowd. Otherwise, you just do it on your own with professional agencies. It is normal that people reacted on the web.

This example shows that crowdsourcing is inevitably linked to internet and social media. Crowdsourcing isn't always approved by the public, even if it's a good initiative to make the crowd participate. This highlights one of the disadvantages of crowdsourcing: the fact that it is sometimes complicated to use the designs/results of the competition. Here, they chose to "improve" it with a design agency, but might have regretted it afterwards.

The interview below is very interesting as it helps us understand how Coca-Cola used crowdsourcing to "crack" its positioning and get new perspectives. At first, it was an experiment but it turned out to be very positive for Coca-Cola. There were some very creative videos. Another interesting thing to know is that they didn't use the most creative or their favourite video for ad campaigns. They chose the one which was the most "on-brief".

With this, Qantas managed to make a very good use of crowdsourcing, social media and new technologies (ex: iphone apps) to create a popular advertising campain.

In this example, crowdsourcing was used in a very strategic way. Consumers participated in a fun way to the advertising campaign. They didn't feel the need to be paid, they just freely gave their image to Qantas, to be seen on TV.

Qantas used crowdsourcing to add a multi-channel dimension to their campaign.