on crowdsourcing.

I've been hearing lately that crowdsourcing is a bad word.

I think the core issue is simpler. If you are asking others to do your work for you, and considering that the magic of collaboration, you are missing the point. A contest that asks the public to create your ads isn't inherently about the audience. It's gluing a high-school essay contest to the emergence of democratized production. This isn't inherently impressive. It's a contest, and this is an old idea.

Gluing it to a multi-million dollar SuperBowl media buy only makes it a worse idea.

If you ask people to work together to create something of value to not only themselves, but to a wider community, the crowd is creating real value. If you want to attach your brand to this, without corrupting it, expect a positive reaction.

Crowdsourcing based entirely on creating value for yourself, your brand, or your client, isn't crowdsourcing. It will either die due to lack of interest, or run entirely on incentive via cash. Paying directly for attention and interaction can be done better and smarter than this.

If you want to get a crowd of people working together on something, it needs to be about that crowd of people. Frankly, everything you do should be about that crowd of people - they decide what your brand means, and exactly how much it's worth.

buying attention is not a long term plan.

I'm no longer sold on the concept of buying attention.

It makes perfect sense in a broadcast media world with few channels, the world traditional advertising was born in. It even makes sense, to an extent, is a world of hundreds of cable channels, with a few category defining hits in each major time slot. Buying attention makes sense if you can cajole a large number people to sit through something they don't really want, in order to access something else.

A short list of things that break the functionality of buying attention: pvr, p2p file sharing, content distribution across regions and markets, streaming, time shifting, format shifting, fragmented audiences. All of these things are made worse by attempts to control them, as making it harder to do each of these things individually, decreased the barriers to removing the advertising from the content at the same time as sharing, shifting, etc.

As always, the fight to enforce the rules of the past just broke the present a little bit faster. Ask the music industry, they seem to have figured it out, now that it's too late for them to go back.

You can no longer reliably buy attention. You can, however, create something that is worthy of attention. You can create associations with a personality, or outlet, or with content that people would like to pay attention to. You can sponsor things worthy of attention, without interfering. You can earn attention, or positive associations, in any of a million ways.

But none of them are the strict exchange of money for attention that traditional advertising is based on. That deal is no longer as effective as it once was. What's left is earning attention, or supporting others as they earn attention.

The major difference is, before you could get away with piggybacking on the value created by others. If you expect people to watch your messages as the price for watching 'Lost', you aren't earning attention, you are interested in buying it.

If you asked someone to care about you, as a cost for caring about someone, or something else, they would laugh at you. I would laugh at you.

You don't force people to care. You don't ask nicely for them to care. You offer them a reason to care, and you hope that the reason is good enough that they do.

You can't buy attention. But I can give you a long list of ways to earn it, if you're interested.