Years ago, I served as a consultant to a large ad agency and was invited to join a meeting with a client. The agency presented rough-cut videos of six approaches for an American automobile manufacturer's Super Bowl commercial. The 30-second air time would cost $4 million and toss in another million to the agency for creative and production and you're talking real money.
The ad agency thought one of the ideas was strongest, but the client preferred a different concept that would feature a famous movie star driving the company's car. The client wanted the commercial with the star, even though the agency thought it would have less impact. How was this dilemma resolved? The auto company executives, who after all were writing the check, got their way and the commercial aired to...thundering indifference. The impact on sales? Zero.
I left that meeting wondering why two suits from Detroit were deciding how $5 million should be spent. Two dudes, really? There had to be a better way.
Here's another way. Some companies use the "click through" approach. Ad agencies produce 50 or even 100 versions of a video and put them up on YouTube to see which ones are "liked." This is crowd-sourcing, but it is time-consuming and costly to make all those versions, follow the likes, and converge on one version. And, as I have written before, "liking" has low to no ability to predict market outcomes so this is the wrong kind of crowd sourcing.
What is a smart creative to do? Crowd-source brains.
Do you know six people with smart watches? Invite them to download the Immersion app and get immediate crowd-sourced feedback on your prototypes. Ready to go to market? Invite 35 people to experience your content while immersion is measured to predict its market impact with 80% or better accuracy and statistical reliability. Not happy with the outcome? Before you release it, go back and tweak your content until you drive up overall immersion by increasing immersion peaks and reducing immersion valleys.
Immersion is workflow software. Subscribers use it at every stage of content development and delivery to ensure they reach market goals. Clients also use Immersion's Super Fan algorithm to optimize the targeting of their content. Immersion does this not by guessing a demographic, but by measuring how brains respond to the content.
Crowd-source? Absolutely! Make sure you do it right by measuring brains, not "likes" or clicks. You can save time and money by getting immediate actionable results from the Immersion platform so you can blow away the competition.