Victors and Spoils may be the smartest, most innovative agency in the marketing/advertising industry.  Sure, I envy what they do and increasingly wish that I had been the originator of their agency model, but no matter what their successes and failures bring, I still don’t necessarily think I like them.

Victors and Spoils is the the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles, They help businesses find a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world’s most talented creatives- the crowd.  What do I mean by the crowd?  I mean a group of 3,000+ designers who check the Victors and Spoils site every week for new creative briefs to work on on their own, when their time allows.

The most interesting aspect of the agency model is the payout.  Essentially they only have to pay the winning designer.  Sure, they claim to award monetary prizes for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and sometimes all of the participants, but essentially they choose one piece of work as the winning design. 

Let’s take a look at the most interesting example of their agency at work.  Not too long ago, leading motorcycle manufacturer Harley Davidson dropped their agency of record.  While everyone else in the industry sat by the wayside waiting for an RFP or an announcement of the next agency that would be working with the brand, John Winsor, CEO of Victors and Spoils got busy.  He wrote up a creative brief for the motorcycle brand, posted it on their project site “Squirrel fight,” and drafted a personal letter to the Harley Davidson’s CMO.  In his note, Winsor wrote the following:

Mark Hans–

It looks like you’ve been busy. We noticed that you ended your relationship with Carmichael Lynch after 31 years. Sounds tough. We also heard that you’re not going to put the account up for review. Sounds smart. AOR relationships tend to be expensive and can lack the kind of flexibility that it takes to succeed in today’s rapidly changing culture.

Anyway, it all got us thinking. We love the Harley-Davidson brand (just like most everyone). And we’ve talked to a bunch of our creatives and strategists (I dare say some of the best in the world) in our 1,800-strong creative department, and H-D was also at the top of the list of the brands they most loved. So, instead of going through the typical steps of credential decks and pitches, we thought we’d try something different.

We’re getting to work.

Just yesterday, the Victors & Spoils team did some quick strategic research pulled from public sources and went ahead and wrote a very open brief. Today, we launched it on our simple work-creation platform called The Squirrel Fight ( http://thesquirrelfight.com ). And right now, creatives and strategists from all over the world are working against your brief.

It’s really fun. And we imagine we’ll be getting in hundreds of great ideas in the next three weeks or so. As we start shaping up some of the ideas, we’d love to show them to you and your team. For every idea you want to buy and produce, we’d propose that you simply pay the V&S creative behind the idea a flat fee of $5,000. (We’re confident enough that our creative process will yield great work that we’ve decided to award $5,000 of our own money to the best idea.)

We hope you’ll give us a call. We’d love to show you what our model can do.

John

Originally, Harley Davidson scoffed at the idea, but gave Winsor the go ahead to do what he wanted to do.  Now, about four months later, Harley Davidson signed Victors and Spoils on as an agency of record for their future work.  It cost the agency a total of $5,000.  Truly amazing use of new and existing technologies to break through the boundaries of a traditional agency.

So why the hate?  Essentially it's just a matter of jealousy, but from a design perspective there is a moral issue at play.  The agency has very few salaried employees.  Essentially they freelance everything, and there are a ton of designers working for them that build their book, but also receive no physical reward for their efforts.  An interesting dilemma indeed, but one that I think Victors and Spoils is eager to defend if challenged.