Event Recap: Crowdsourcing Creativity with Heath Rudduck
A good idea is a funny thing. If you keep it to yourself long enough, it’s no longer a good idea. On the other hand, inviting others to hear your ideas and contribute to them allows them to blossom. Heath Rudduck believes that crowdsourcing your creativity is not only beneficial, but mandatory in this day of ever-increasing complexity across the interactive marketing landscape.
Heath Rudduck is Campbell Mithun’s Chief Creative Officer, a post he started this winter after moving his family west from Boston to the Twin Cities at the end of 2010. I’m not sure which came as a bigger shock: changing residences from his native Australia to the United States or being greeted by four and a half feet of snow upon his arrival in Minneapolis after the blizzards of December 2010.
Barely six months later, Heath seemed right at home with his Minnesota neighbors as he presented Crowdsourcing Creativity at the well-attended MIMA event held at the University of Minnesota’s beautiful McNamara Alumni Center on Wednesday.
The first part of Heath’s presentation examined how complex our marketing and technology landscape has become, a point which was underscored by the event staff’s initial difficulties in projecting the slides from Rudduck’s laptop. Heath cited a plethora of new gadgets and technologies that have made our lives both more convenient and complex.
This complexity has made for an extremely fragmented interactive marketplace, and this fragmentation requires that more thought and collaboration go into new creative and marketing ideas than ever before. Gone are the Mad Men days of copywriter and art director duos. Today’s teams also require new roles such as user experience strategists, media planners, and even search engine optimization professionals to be successful.
Adjusting to all these new touch points and contributors to our efforts can be difficult, but Heath had five suggestions to ease into crowdsourcing creativity within our own teams:
- Relax to go fast
- Stop hiring in your own image
- Embrace the entrepreneur
- Risk getting it wrong
- Embrace the under-confident over-achiever
Heath finished with the thought that it takes a village to raise an idea. Good ideas will go bad and will never become great if their originator doesn’t share and grow them with team members of different skill sets, passions and perspectives. This requires a new level of planning for most creative projects, which isn’t always easy or fun. But all this planing pays off when our campaigns are able to capture the attention of today’s consumer and their increasingly complex worlds.
Blog-Only Bonus:Â After the event, Heath sat down with me to share his ideas on his own creative process and when he considers a good idea to be complete.
Watch the post-event interview on Vimeo.
Crowdsourcing Creativity was an entertaining and insightful look into developing creative ideas. Heath’s presentation added to the list of successful 2011 MIMA events, which are building up to the 10th Anniversary of the MIMA Summit in October. Register now for discounted tickets before it’s too late.
August 10th, 2011 at 7:01 pm
It’s great to hear presentations like these. Based on Yannig Roth’s blog post, http://crowdsourcing.org/l/2897, he said that “crowdsourcing is definitely not dead, the best platforms are just finding their sweet spots”. So, presentations like what Heath gave during the MIMA event somehow sheds some light on crowdsourcing creativity.