Why “Elect The Jury” is a great idea, but doesn’t go far enough. Yet.
6th November 09
Posted in creativity
We’re full of respect for the way co-Chairs of the ANDYs, Michael Lebowitz and Ty Montague are shaking things up with their “Elect The Jury” platform for the election of 2010 ANDYs judges. Involving the industry in collaboratively determining who should judge what is ‘great work’ is a more democratic and more interesting way to put together a broad-ranging panel of top notch creative people. It’s also an opportunity for the industry to create a jury that doesn’t just judge and reward the past, but in some way tries to sketch out a vision of where this thing we loosely call ‘creativity’ is going.
I’ve caught up with both Ty and Michael over the last few days to ask them how it’s going, what they’re learning, and what’s next (though what follows is my view, not theirs, necessarily).
The first thing to note, and to celebrate, is that as an experiment, it’s clearly already been a success.
They’ve pissed some people off; always a sign that you’re doing something right.
They’ve curated a brilliant list of some truly phenomenal people across an extensive spread of creative industries, art and culture; this seems pioneering.
They’ve provided a platform for debate about the role of technology in creativity, the role (or not) of big ideas, and the role and value (or not) of awards shows; about time that happened.
But we also need to look at what’s happened as a result . . . where we’ve ended up, with less than 10 days to go.
We’ve ended up with a fairly conventional - dare I say it, expected - list of the top 25 jurors. It is a list that glitters with talent, experience and in many cases, legends. It has some unconventional entries, which is great (Shepard Fairey, Marc Jacobs). It has some super worthy judges who might not normally find their way on to the shortlist (Vivian Rosenthal of Tronic). But the remainder of the shortlist seems to be the ECDs from the top large agencies, mostly in the the US.
Below ‘the cut’ (at least currently - voting doesn’t end for a few days yet) are some phenomenal people who both define and in many ways embody an emerging sense of what creativity is, or perhaps even more, might become. I’ll list a few of my personal heroes here. These are people who excite me when they talk about ideas. These are people I’d collectively describe as hacking creativity, media, interactive art, or culture. They are at the forefront of trying to mutate formats, channels or content into new forms. They are not all in creative departments, but they are in some way creative people.
Kevin Slavin of area / code; John Winsor, latterly of CPB, now of Victors & Spoils; Faris Yakob of McCann NY; Noah Brier of Barbarian; Benjamin Palmer of Barbarian; Mike Monello of Campfire; Yugo Nakamura of Yugop; Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”; Hashem Bajwa of Droga.
Let’s be blunt about something. They are possibly not the people to go to for craft skills in art direction, film or typography (to name but three); craft skills that are still critically important in so many ways to creating magically good content. But they are the kinds of people who might create new crafts altogether. And that’s why they’re interesting &, I’d argue, relevant.
I believe that alongside the Legends of Creativity who already populate the ANDYs shortlist (many of whom are also clearly completely at home blending technology with creativity), we need more people like this judging and guiding creativity.
So here’s my suggestion.
Let’s try and persuade Michael and Ty to take the great list of creative talent they’ve carefully curated and stage a *Second Round* of their experiment. Before they have to finally appoint the jury.
Let’s try and persuade them to create empty categories. To take the entire 150+ curated list and ask the people in the industry to help allocate judges to categories. Once judges are in categories, then people can vote up their favorites so that we end up with a crowdsourced final list who go on to to be jury members.
And this time people can only vote once for their top 5. Just like real politics.
We might end up with a broader definition of creativity, and some helpful pointers to the future.
What do you think?
37 comments on “Why “Elect The Jury” is a great idea, but doesn’t go far enough. Yet.”
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Ben Malbon
I applaud your intent re voting on Elect the Jury, Ben, but your solution to the problem sounds too complicated.
Clearly some great people from smaller niche companies, or outside the ad biz, are not rising to the top (no Clay Shirky in 25?) — either because their fame is not the equal of the Exec Creative Directors at biggest agencies (with 1,000 employees voting for them on a daily basis?). Or because they just aren’t plain that well-known.
A number of us have voted for Mike Monello, one of my partners, who’s on the list, but we don’t have the time or firepower to move him up to top 25.
Mike has done a lot to pioneer the New Marketing, starting with The Blair Witch Project, but is one of those guys who only occasionally appears at conferences or award shows and doesn’t maintain a personal blog.
I’m assuming that Ty and Michael will do their own additive curating to fill out the list with people like Mike who chose to focus solely on their work, rather than building their fame…
It seems unless the less known potential judges come up with an innovative way to get themselves into the consideration set, the odds would be against any outsider types being nominated.
Of course you could also potentially have a blog (like this one) being a launching pad for these types of campaigns. Sorta like newspapers endorsing political candidates.
I have to say, I was honored to be considered by Ty and Michael as a nominee. And, initially, I liked the idea of crowd sourcing the ANDY jury. As the current Chairman of The One Club I was jealous that we hadn’t thought of it. But after a little more reflection I began to think differently (and please don’t think my One Club association has ANYTHING to do with this point of view… it doesn’t). As I thought more, I began to worry that the flaws in “Elect The Jury” were actually creating the opposite effect of democratizing the selection. Its flaws being three primary things: 1) in this case people have to vote from memory rather than experience; 2) encouraging nominees to actually stump for votes; and 3) allowing people to vote repeatedly.
All three of these things make “crowd sourcing,” in my opinion, “crowd steering.”
“Crowd sourcing” as a selection tool can be very effective when the playing field is equal. It seems to work well for “American Idol” because everyone performs and then the crowd gets to vote. So they vote on experience. But that isn’t the way this works. No, unfortunately not. People either know the nominees or they don’t and they vote accordingly. Which, as Steve Wax pointed out, rewards “fame.”
And encouraging nominees to stump for votes only rewards those who have the inclination to do so. Many talented people (Banksy, for example), I would imagine had no such inclination… and is that a good thing for the jury? What if, hypothetically, under these rules only ECDs of big, traditional agencies decided to stump for votes… would that create a well-balanced crowd-sourced pool?
And as Steve alluded to in his comment, doesn’t the ability to cast one vote every day unfairly tip the scales toward those big agency networks with all-staff email lists in the thousands? Not to mention reward those who create teams of voters (it’s happening).
Once I’d thought about all this kind of stuff I decided I wasn’t going to try to influence my place on the list. And when a person in my agency sent out an all-staff email telling people to vote for me I quickly asked for it to be removed. I just didn’t like the taste.
I’m certainly not judging anyone here. I’ve seen some very funny, inventive, and effective ways for people to influence their ranking. And more power to them. I’m also not spitting out sour grapes (I gotta believe I’m nowhere near the Top 25). I’m just saying that my opinion is different. In my opinion award show juries should be designed by people who know what kind of jury they want to create in order to have the kind of show they want to represent. And then you, the consumer, can agree or disagree with the kind of show it is by supporting it or not. That’s capitalism at its best.
At this past week’s terrific Audience conference, Andrew Keen — “The Cult of the Amateur” — highlighted the confusion between audience and author, and the false empowering of the masses. Or, in his words, the “empowerment of the narcissistic and the ignorant.”
While a bit too Ayn Rand for me, Andrew’s point was that in these revolutionary times, the crowd is rising up and overthrowing the old cultural leaders and new leaders are emerging: a new cultural elite.
He compared this revolt to the English Reformation (wow!). And while he counts himself among the new “Cultural Revolutionaries” like Robert Scoble, Malcolm Gladwell, etc., he decries their false “Democratization of the Media”.
Keen’s point, one I endorse, is the “Masses” have been duped by the new elite into believing they have power.
The Audience only has “a sense of their power” no real power in terms of the new media dialogue. People comment, blog, tweet, and feel powerful, but few are heard, so few have any real power.
Perhaps the same point could be made about the Andy’s jury selection process and the vote for the top 25.
Keen would probably say that we all think we are voting for the Andy’s jury, but we’re really not. I would guess that’s fine with Keen, but he just wants us all to be honest.
“Leaders need to step up and acknowledge their authority,” he says, “false humility is the thing that will kill the professional creative media creator in the 21st Century.”
This applies to the whole silly concept of crowd sourcing as well… but that’s a discussion for another day.
Cheers for both your comments Steve. All good food for thought. Agree with many of your points.
Having spent some time talking to both Ty & Michael, I think it’s safe to say this isn’t about false humility, or any attempt to dupe audiences, voters or potential jurors. I think it’s an experiment - a fascinating experiment - and I’m fairly sure there are a bunch of things they’d do differently next time. Not sure anyone can (or should) critique them for that. Personally, I applaud them.
And in fact I’m not critiquing them here either, I’m trying to push them to be more, not less, disruptive, to see if there might be a second (perhaps unplanned, perhaps planned) stage to the election process which mixes their curatorial power as Chairs with a very broad creative electorate’s view of what creative is, might become, or should become.
There are some awesome jurors in the top 25 currently, but I’d like to see a more eclectic selection be appointed.
Now, more than perhaps any time for some decades, sketching out what kind of creativity we might all strive for, is fundamental.
Not critiquing Ty or Michael here either. Fan and a supporter of both and certainly the Andy’s, which has always been generous to Campfire. And the Elect the Jury competition has brought a lot of well deserved attention to this Year’s Andy’s.
My point (via Andrew Keen’s presentation) is about the larger cultural debate about the role of the audience.
Would love to see that presentation.
With the cacophony of noise around crowdsourcing, collaborative creativity and new ‘outsourced’ models enabled by the internet reaching fever pitch, it sounds a highly relevant piece (even to someone who’s broadly a fan of the underlying principles).
Many thanks again for taking the time to share thinking Steve.
If I understand Keen’s point (and I’m not sure I’m that smart), I completely agree. I don’t think “the crowd” is really making this decision (as much as they’ve been told they are) because it’s not a level playing field. This may have been designed as an experiment in crowd sourcing (and I, too, applaud Ty and Michael’s attempt), but in reality it seems to be little more than a crowd steer. And to Ben’s point, that becomes very apparent when you look at the current list of 25. As talented as each and every one of those people is - and deserving to be there - it’s not a drastically different list than it was could have been 5 years ago. And it’s primarily a population of the most famous and well-connected.
(I’m not passing judgment on whether that’s right or wrong, I’m just saying that in my opinion that’s what this exercise was destined to create.)
So I’ll say it again, I believe award show juries should be designed by a small group of people who know what kind of jury they want to create in order to have the kind of show they want to represent. The rest is then in the “consumer’s” hands.
If the ANDY’s wants to create a jury that’s been designed by the most famous and well-connected people in the business, then this may be an interesting way to get there.
One of ideas we talk about at Campfire is failure, and how important it is to success. That is, if you create something in an iterative fashion, such as lots of little, seqenced content, you adjust direction based on small failures as well as small successes.
This process is replacing focus groups in marketing, and draws on direct mail practice (horrors!)
So… what Ty and Michael are doing here is exploring thru failure. “Congratulations on your failure!” -the new New Marketing hello.
In case you didn’t catch my RT@markmedia, this is an interesting and timely addition to the discussion:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_dirty_little_secret_about_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds.php
Call me naive, but my disappointment is more in the fact that those Top 25 ( which I acknowledge Ben are expected), have not embraced the concept of ‘Integration’ ( which is being preached so heartily within all the larger organizations) in the context of this democratic voting arena. When in fact, what is being exercised here is absolute segregation and one could even go so far as to say, not entirely democratic! I fully expected these brilliant traditional top level people to see this as a huge opportunity to encourage their worldwide organizations to vote across this broad band of talent not only as being highly instrumental in evolving the landscape of the Awards Business, but also as a form of education to the hundreds and thousands of people that either work for them or respect them. That power alone is immense. It is a shame it has only been directed to the cause of one vote. As I said, call me naive, but I am forever optimistic!
This is such a great dialogue. First off, I was honored to be on the list, thanks to Ty. Likewise, your mention above is humbling.
I applaud Ty and Michael with experimenting. But, it’s not hard to see why traditional candidates are dominating the nominations. Those that represent disruptive technologies or thinking rarely are acknowledged by incumbent market leaders, the large global networks, in any market.
I’m interested in the longer term trend. My hunch is that there will be a radical flip in the market which will be reflected in the ANDY’s judging in years to come.
For now, the market leaders hold on tightly to the vestiges of prestige as the world changes around them.
I, too, would like to see the award juries evolve to include more than art directors and copywriters and better represent marketing creativity today. At CP+B, Technologists and UX designers sit in our creative department and play a huge role in guiding creative strategy and execution for the agency and our clients. I’d like to start seeing more people like Scott Prindle, Executive Creative Technology Director, CP+B, John Mayo-Smith, CTO of R/GA, and UX leaders from around the industry appear more often on these juries. And I think that categorization is a good thing. What qualifies as great and effective marketing is changing before our eyes in real-time. And in the digital age, it just so happens that there are more people sitting at the creative table, from producers to technologists to UX designers to interactive strategists. Why wouldn’t the creative people making the work also be the ones judging it?
Electthejury.com, as initially executed, is a good conversation starter, and it imagines a more integrated jury. But as Ben points out, it looks like the final group will not be all that different from years past, and it would be awesome to end up with a more integrated one next year. Public voting is participatory and does a lot to get more people talking about the show, but to me the bigger thing is just making sure we get more technology in the mix. The evolution may happen all on its own as interactive moves more and more to center of our agencies, but any ideas to jumpstart it would be welcome. We all will benefit by having our best technology thinkers sit on these juries.
Hey Winston, thanks so much for your thoughts. Agree 100%. Technology is so central. Agree.
This jury picking fiasco is a total failure because of:
1 vote stuffing by people who personally know or work with candidate X
2 star f*cking votes for famous candidate x
3 “I’m not voting for candidate x because I’ve never heard of him/her” bias
I don’t know how to fix it.
Sounds great
“You’ve done the work. Now elect the jury.” That’s what it says on their site.
It used to be ’show me your book/reel’ was the only way to judge whether someone had a clue as to what they were talking about. I think now more than ever, that should be the case. What you’ve created should be what qualifies you to judge, period.
There are people on this list whose work (that they’ve created or creative directed) I know and admire and would be honored to have my work evaluated by.
But then there are people who promote themselves as innovators and creative thinkers, but who’s actual work (if any at all) really isn’t that inspiring.
So as a creative, I’m really fine with anyone judging a ‘creative communications award show’…as long as they themselves create.
I would not be interested in recognition from popular people with blog followings, or curators or critics who merely think of themselves as ‘creative people.’
So whether judges are art directors or copywriters, or designers, or programmers or technologists or directors, it doesn’t matter.
Only as long as they have proven themselves with amazing work themselves, that can qualify them to judge it. If you’ve written spots, you can judge spots. If you’ve designed websites, you can judge websites.
I want people who get their hands dirty in the trenches, actually creating the work - my peers - to evaluate my work. That’s the point of an award show that’s supposed to raise the creative bar.
Otherwise, it’s called the effies or the people’s choice.
As for the crowdsourcing element, crowdsourcing is a great tool when implemented right. And it seemed to be an exciting initiative.
Unfortunately, having realized I could vote a couple of times, I stopped, as this system is flawed:
1. Open lots of email accounts.
2. Vote for the same people from every email account.
3. Repeat the next day.
4. Visit often to marvel at the fruits of your self-promotion.
Unfortunately, this bug is easily exploitable by the more clever (or narcissistic or underworked).
Amen to that.
Aren’t you suggesting just the “other” group of usual suspects? Those SAME people judge (almost) every panel related to digital.
In the industry where criteria of success are fuzzy, it all comes down to informal networks, seniority, past successes, personal liking, and politics.
What we may need instead of electing the jurors is voting on some tangible criteria + real-life data by which entries should be evaluated. How do we think it makes sense to measure success of a campaign? Once there are empirical criteria in place, it would not really matter that much who the jurors are …
p.s. I really like all of the people you suggest, Ben, but honestly would like to see some other digital names for change.
Hi Ana
Thanks for your comments.
I’m suggesting an amalgam.
Different folks, different takes on creativity. Integrated together.
All must be of the highest calibre, absolutely.
Ben
I greatly applaud the experimentation. Until someone actually tries something new, rather than pontificate about it, these great conversations never emerge.
In seeing who is coming to the top I was a bit disappointed as I’d hoped to see some new names and faces. However, it did make me appreciate just how truly great these folks are. How many times for many clients they have repeatedly done new and amazing things. How these folks are doing ground breaking technical and integrative work. Maybe our instant bias against the known is misguided.
While I greatly respect the names you’ve put forth for alternates the one thing missing is I don’t really know what they have done. I know what they think, what conferences they attend and what their PowerPoint decks look like but what are some great applied examples of their new craft? What are the specific examples of work that is amazing and has gone into the market to achieve great success. I don’t mean offense, they are very intelligent people saying things I agree with. But that’s not enough to be on a jury is it?
I wholly agree with the types of folks Winston suggests. I know what work these folks have touched. They are active and equal members of creative teams - and while any creative has many contributors there are but two or a few true drivers & owners; these folks are owners. These are the skills of the future. Skills like UX are in need of celebration as we need to encourage more folks to learn this craft. And not just in the digital sense but the integrative trans-media sense. Even UX can be a bit traditional in its application.
But please, lets not make UX another category to enter but part of the gestalt of great work…
Hi Brett
If you’re suggesting that only people who’ve been part of a creative process (i.e. have been ‘hands on’ responsible for creating something) should be eligible for jury duty, I kind of agree. I don’t want to make it about these people I listed as examples (it’s a generic point I’m making, & they are already embarrassed that I called them out), but if you scratch the surface of what they’ve been involved with then I think you can see they’ve been at the heart of some fairly impressive creative output, over many many years.
I don’t think it’s ‘either/or’, I think it’s ‘and’.
Cheers for your thoughts.
To ‘Ty’ above - which I’m sure that you are not - historically that’s because it’s an award show hosted by peers to recognize other peers for creativity.
From the ANDY site:
“The goal of the competition is to honor creativity in advertising throughout the world, recognize the contributions of individuals and companies who create the work and encourage raising the standards of craftsmanship in the industry.”
It’s to honor creativity and craftsmanship. So I don’t understand why people want to hijack creative award shows to fit their own box of effectiveness. That’s determined in the marketplace.
Hey Tim, thanks for your comments and input - all good stuff.
I’m sorry I’ve had to remove the comment from someone purporting to be Ty (to which you refer), as it wasn’t Ty Montague. First time we’ve done that in almost 900 comments left on the Labs blog, which is a shame.
I’m not sure anyone is trying to hijack anything for the sake of ‘effectiveness’, just to be clear. As you note, there are some exceptionally good awards that shine a light on that already.
While I admire what Michael and Ty are trying to do here and the passion behind it, as I read through the comments, I can’t help but think of Occam’s Razr: it may simply be that the sort of people who are inclined to vote for the likes of Clay Shirkey and Noah Brier are not the sort of people who have any interest in winning an Andy Award, while the sort of people who feel their careers will be furthered by winning an Andy Award are the sort of people who’d like to have their work judged by what many commenters here have called “the usual suspects”
I understand that “ElectTheJury” was an attempt to make the Andy Awards more relevant to a broader audience, and to Dany Lennon’s point, it’s a shame that this wasn’t seen as a chance for “integrated” agencies to expand their horizons.
But they didn’t and we’re left with a situation where the judging panel is one that seems to reflect the ultimate audience for the Andys.
To Steve Wax’s point about failure and micro-adjustments, this may not even be the failure it first seems: the Andy’s– a show that had gone off most people’s radars– got a ton of publicity, got a reputation for being more forward thinking than many other “traditional” award shows and has a jury that seems to reflect the needs of its 2009 pool of entrants. What’s more, the door is open for further adjustment in future years.
That sounds more like success than failure to me.
Great point.
In the immortal words of Captain Benjamin J Willard ‘ everyone gets everything he wants’.
I don’t think this is a failure, remotely. I think it’s a case of, to quote Eric Schmidt, ‘making mistakes wisely’.
Hello all. This time it really is me : )
First, I’d like to thank the contributors to this thread. The level of discourse is truly great. If I had to sum up my response to all this I would say, I think you’re all right.
Kevin and Steve you’re both right that the system we chose has flaws. Execution has revealed those flaws to us. Allowing people to vote more than once was a call we made to try to encourage people to visit more than once. That worked well. But it may have allowed people in big networks and with big networks of friends to take advantage of that aspect of the site if they chose to. Impossible to know if that happened, but it could have.
But there are also a number of things that could have gone wrong that didn’t.
For instance, I was really worried that things might get really negative around the campaigning. That never happened. We were so pleased to see the sense of humor and good natured rivalry that people brought to this. The positive energy has been really inspiring.
We also wondered if people who were really active in social media would exploit that and run away with the election. we wondered if we would wind up with a 100% interactive and digital group of judges. That wouldn’t have been a disaster, but imbalance in any direction was something we wanted to try to avoid. The opportunity was certainly there. But clearly that hasn’t happened.
I wondered also what the effect of jurors campaigning would have on people. I wondered if the industry would decide that campaigning was a bad thing, and actively vote for people who chose not to campaign. That doesn’t seem to have happened either. As I said before, the campaigning has been amazingly positive and in many cases really creative too.
I was worried that enough qualified people wouldn’t agree to participate as nominees. I think it showed real brass to throw your hat in this ring as a nominee. Who knew what was going to happen? I think the nominee list is amazing and I am truly thankful to everyone who participated. There isn’t a single person on the list who wouldn’t be an awesome juror.
We also wondered if the site would get hacked. One person tried, and failed. I was kinda hoping they’d try again : )
John W I think you’re absolutely right that its a longer game. We are all just learning about the space, what works and what doesn’t. We have learned a ton by doing this. And we want to apply that moving forward. More on that in a second.
Alan W I really agree with you also. The whole idea of doing this was to try something that had never been tried before. We knew that there would be flaws, but at the end of the day, we also knew that whatever the outcome, the Andy’s and the Andy jury would be a part of the conversation in a way they had never been before. I think that has worked out very well.
Winston great to see you here and we gotta meet someday. Big fan. I agree technology is way under represented here. And in the industry in general. Gotta fix that. Alex gave me a heads up on Prindle but by then we already had a whole bunch of people from CPB nominated. Our bad.
So here’s the thing. Warts and all, I’m really happy with how this thing is turning out. The conversations it is generating are great, and exactly what we need to be talking about as an industry. Whether we agree with the final jury or not, I hope we can all agree that the final jury will be well qualified. That’s the most important part to me. I think we can also agree that the system for arriving at the Jury could be better.
So here is my ask: the Andy Chair job is a two year gig. Michael and I have already signed up for round two. I would like to continue this dialogue and work together on plugging the holes and solving some of these issues for Elect The Jury II. (Gina and the Andy’s have not officially agreed to this by the way so I’m taking a flier here).
Michael and I have a few ideas for changing the structure and the voting for next time. Once voting closes on the 15th (only days left! Vote!) we will post those ideas on this thread for your comments and continue this dialogue.
Deal?
TM
I really like Tim’s comments. He’s right. Effectiveness is not and should not be a part of a show like The ANDYs. And again, as to my earlier point, if you don’t agree with that then don’t support the show. That’s the capitalist way! Other shows reward effectiveness… and rightly so… but some shows need to be designed to celebrate creativity. Period. These shows need to reward inspiration. They need to raise the bar. They need to show what’s possible.
As for who judges… there, too, Tim has a point. You need to earn your way onto that list. You need to earn your way into the pool. Just because you are embracing new and innovative ways of marketing sooner than others does not automatically qualify you to judge what’s best.
The question for me then remains: what is the appropriate way to create that judging pool? And at the risk of repeating myself for a third time…
Agree on the effectiveness point. Absolutely. Far too complex and difficult to get to grips with in specialist effectiveness awards (almost all effectiveness awards are in some way flawed), let alone celebrations of creativity such as this.
My 2 cents:
Identify a Stage One group of 12 jurors by any process you want (selected directly by Ty and Michael, popular vote, whatever).
Then, have this group each select one person they want to add to the panel from the remaining candidates. Can’t be a co-worker or even someone from the same direct industry.
That leaves you with 24 jurors. The 25th place goes to a “civilian”. It would be refreshing to hear someone call bullshit on the ‘creatives’ and provide a viewpoint from outside the echo chamber.
Dear Academy,
Disregarding box office receipts, popular opinion, I believe directors and producers are no longer qualified to judge their peers. I believe it should be open and democratic, like a Tyra Banks audience.
Because the crowd, I mean groupthink, is always best.
Sincerely, Bob.
P.S. Please give me your business.
I can’t help but think a bit of disruption - in this case hacking an awards show from the inside - is to be applauded, we’ve just got to learn how best to apply it.
Crowd sourcing is still in its infancy, sure, but it seems odd that so many of our debates on the subject seem to stop at the (clearly semi-heretical) use of the crowd. The best experiments surely strike a balance between FRESH inputs from the crowd, with RESPONSIBILITY for decision-making ultimately taken by a few.
One size does not fit all in terms of how that plays out, however. Sometimes it’s appropriate to lean more towards the crowd (as Kevin says, a largely open vote seems appropriate for American Idol-style contests where the audience experience an act & where success ultimately depends on the *mass* appeal of the show format & sales after the event). At the opposite end of the scale the crowd nominates but that’s it. In other cases, it’s more appropriate to seek an (often expert) crowd’s help in suggesting solutions & early stage filtering, but draw the line there.
It seems a shame to suggest we revert to a closed-doors approach just because very ‘open’ crowdsourcing hasn’t worked. We also need to recognise that ‘creativity’ can come from anywhere, now more than ever.
I wonder if a solution here might have been an uncomplicated (& frankly faster) 3 stage approach:
1. Ask the crowd for nominations
2. Crowd votes on longlist of nominees (*max* 2 week period)
3. Judges make final call on jury, taking into consideration: crowd votes, nominee contributions & their own deeply (& rightly..) biased opinion.
If you want it more open but no less uncomplicated, you could switch 2 & 3, putting a shortlist (whittled down by the judges) back to the crowd to make the final call.
Either way, expert judgement is applied AND the show benefits from the heightened currency & ripple of awareness that the involvement of a broader group naturally generates (whether on or off the ANDY’s site, this is happening - witness http://www.electthejury.com/questions/ and Rob Schwartz’s http://andypotential.posterous.com/)
The irony here is that - contrary to any suggestion there’s an abdication of responsibility by the judges - the pressure to make the right call when you’ve invited the input of the crowd (an educated, expert one at that) is only that much greater. In the case of Ty and Michael, based on their experience and the open-minded approach they’ve taken so far, I would have faith that their ultimate call on nominees would be sound. And if not? Well, the show may not work as well as it could have done & there’ll be learnings for next time.
Jokes about embracing failure aside (not to mention the fact we absolutely must draw breath & apply judgement - exactly what Ben is doing with this post in fact), let’s stay confident and keep an open mind about the trialling of new approaches. Real progress isn’t possible without them. As Charles Darwin said:
“I love fools’ experiments, I’m always making them.”
[...] “Wow. It’s getting pretty interesting out there.” And after reading nominee Ben Malbon’s great post last Friday and the comments that followed, it was pretty clear that the nominating process [...]
Or… we could have the ‘crowd’ simply bypass judging the judges and just judge the work and then bypass that and have them produce the work they ultimately will judge, which is almost right back where we started from with judges from certain shops judging work from basically the same shops. Hmmmm, I’m really not as cynical as this makes me seem.
I really liked this idea and think it worked they way Ty, et al have planned. I did vote, by the way for five folks that didn’t quite make the final cut. Kudos to all involved, it was fun watching this unfold.
JJ
Thanks Ty… helpful response and good to hear from the co-man at the top on this. As I’ve said, I applaud your intent and, yes, even your execution (at least you’re out there trying to change the system… I was jealous when I heard about it and still am). Warts and all, it has opened a dialogue that needs a platform… and I’m glad BBH Labs could help (I am, admittedly, biased).
I’m still interested, however, in your thoughts on Tim’s post. I, for one, think he has a very good point that needs to be part of this conversation. If “technology” needs greater representation on this jury, what form should that take? Bloggers? Critics? “Creatives?” There’s a real debate to be had here about who is best qualified to judge the creativity of others.
Personally, I’d love to see that as a big part of your thinking going in to “Elect The Jury II. This Time It’s Personal!”
Figured out a method…if someone really wanted to influence this vote, all they needed to do would be to post this request on Amazon’s MechanicalTurk website:
–
Task:
Log on to electthejury.com.
1. Vote for the following names, by clicking:
Nominee name 1.
Nominee name 2.
Nominee name 3.
Nominee name 4.
Nominee name 5.
2. Click ‘Cast Ballot.’
3. Enter an email account.
4. Decline mailing list option.
5. Confirm from your email account by clicking on link.
6. Paste email confirmation in comment box to confirm for payment.
–
This way, all someone would need to do is crowdsource their vote. And a little bit of money could buy as many votes as they’d want for between .05-.50 cents per turk task. And ‘campaigning’ for someone’s vote in the contest on someone’s behalf does not violate any rules as laid out on the website. In fact, it’s even encouraged.
Now that’s crowdsourcing.
Lengthy thread. The last time I was on a jury for creativity in Milan for JWT worldwide I learnt something quite remarkable. Even some of the most seasoned professionals in the business missed some of the most exquisite, clever and memorable advertising creativity we assessed. After a while I just marked everyone up because it seemed they all needed the encouragement.
The end.