The Future of Creativity: Fast, Cheap, Out of Control

By Jim Edwards

NEW YORK -- Marketers have traditionally paid big bucks for creativity—the trendy art director, the hot commercial producer, both of whose salaries are covered by hefty hourly billings. But the price of artistic genius may be about to drop dramatically.

Companies like Spot Runner, PayPerPost, PayPerClip, Current TV, BrightCove, BrandWizard, Google's AdSense for radio and newspapers, and, yes, YouTube, now offer cheap, fast, online commercial creation, media placement and public relations services without the need for a traditional full-service agency. And they come at a fraction of the cost of Madison Avenue. Call it the commodification of creativity.

"We heard from so many CEOs that they want publicity but they can't commit to a $10,000 retainer a month for the next year," said PayPerClip managing director Richard Virgilio. PayPerClip offers low-price media relations where clients only pay if media coverage results. "There are a million businesses that don't need writing services, speakers bureaus, strategic thinking and positioning and analysis of the market . . . a lot of businesses just need exposure," Virgilio said.

These new marketing services companies are relatively new, but more of them pop up every day with increasingly sophisticated offerings. They largely serve clients with smaller budgets who don't have the luxury of spending $250,000 or so to film a TV spot.

Major clients are already experimenting with nonagency commercials. Alka-Seltzer, Frito-Lay, the NFL and Chevrolet have all commissioned spots created by amateurs to run on Super Bowl day, for instance. And Wal-Mart's former svp-marketing communications, Julie Roehm, famously called for an eBay-style marketplace to replace the TV upfront.

Although it will be a while before major marketers start firing ad agencies and placing RFPs online for amateurs and Web-based aggregation services to handle, the question they beg gets louder and louder:

If Current TV's viewers will create a spot for $1,000, if Spot Runner can place an ad on TBS in Kentucky for $31, and if BrandWizard can store your artwork for error-free use in remote markets, why bother with an office tower full of account chiefs, media-planners, copywriters and strategy consultants?

Certainly, the results might be messier and less sophisticated to look at. Spot Runner's commercials are, by their nature, generic. Current TV makes a good one-off, but is unlikely to give you a yearlong campaign strategy. In terms of return on dollars invested, it's not hard to see that in the future clients will demand that their creativity be as commodified as possible—that is, cheap, chopped up into small chunks and managed remotely.

It raises the possibility that what the Web has done to the newspaper industry, and is currently doing to the TV industry, it may yet do to the international ad agency holding companies—take their business, disintegrate it, and farm it out to amateurs, fans and niche startups.

"Everything is chipping off a piece of the old-fashioned agency business," said Jon Bond, principal at Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners in New York. Still, he said, "I don't think it's going to be the main way you do your campaigns. It's going to be one of a million ways to do your campaign."

While the idea may give ad agencies pause, those at the cutting edge of this trend shy away from describing what they do as "commodification."

For instance, Robin Rusch, CEO of BrandWizard, a unit of Interbrand, disagreed with the term. Her company does not create ads. "We automate the process. That's one difference," she said, adding BrandWizard simply "allows the creative people to create campaigns and know they're going to be implemented correctly."

David Waxman, vp-marketing at Spot Runner, agreed: "When I think of something that is commodified I think of something that's made less differentiable. [That's] more of a democratization than a commodification."