Creative for Communication – www.jovoto.com

Why this example was selected

Jovoto aims to directly connect advertisers with creative professionals via a unique blend of competition and licensing models for an broad community of creative professionals. It is still in its early stages, but the feedback from the community and clients has been very positive.

Sources: participation in the community and interview.

Figure Jovoto OPTO scores.

Outcome – 3

Jovoto is still early in its development, at least from the perspective of scale. Being able to point to more successes would increase the outcome score. To date, a number of public competitions have been held as well as an unspecified number of private competitions (used within organizations or privately organized communities). That said, the feedback from the clients suggests that they are very excited and happy with the outcome and when these include some very well known German brands, there is reason for optimism.

Jovoto deals in ideas, not necessarily final products (although some of the work is very well executed), so there is still a final execution step which has an impact on whether or not the ideas from the Jovoto community take flight.

Finally, a very promising early Outcome is the way in which the community works together. It may take a while to scale the business, but just having creative groups come together, share their work and give feedback is a breakthrough that moves the advertising creative process closer to what has been achieved with open source. Jovoto has just started to experiment with approaches to enable easy team-forming. This seems to have great promise.

People - 4

Jovoto has attracted over 5000 community members from the creative industries. A recent competition for the city of Wurzburg in Germany attracted 90 submissions in 5 weeks. Most submissions received ratings and comments, suggesting that everyone is getting some value beyond the winners – a critical alignment factor. For political candidate Frank-Walter Stein Meier, over 1000 ideas were submitted, with 2400 comments and over 10000 votes (Jovoto). The community is primarily German and so it is hard to compare Jovoto to some other communities like Crowdspring, Innocentive or Ideabounty, as one can see from Google Insights, comparing the four. That said, the participation numbers suggest a very active and engaged community.

Beyond the numbers, one of the elements that is not clear, if how much responsibility is being given to the community – there is room for direct interaction, but it is not clear where he discussions are about the community itself – what’s working, what needs to change, etc.

Tools - 4

Jovoto has created a suite of tools dedicated to the task at hand. The Jovoto site is used to manage competitions and provide a forum for community interaction. Adding and reviewing ideas is simple and a variety of notification options ensure that people can choose how they want to stay connected and communicate – in short, Jovoto adds very little overhead to participate and this is its major success.

The user experience, reminds of 37Signals products, which are, from a user experience perspective, experiences worth emulating.

From a pure communications perspective, Jovoto makes use of a number of communication tools including a blog, forums, e-mail and Twitter, so the members of the Jovoto team are in constant contact with the larger community, clients and people submitting ideas to competitions. However, there are some possible additions in terms of free interaction within the community, outside of the competitions – for example, to discuss Jovoto itself.

Organization – 3

From the outset, Jovoto has focused on empowering creative professionals. This means they constantly seek feedback and respond with new features, policy changes, etc.

The core processes and decisions represent a step forward from other competition-style communities. Most importantly, while clients can license ideas, as they can in other competitions, Jovoto has added a new dimension by finding a way for the community to interact and provide feedback while balancing the need for intellectual property rights. This means that Jovoto is unlocking the real potential of the community – the comments, votes and questions that enable work to be improved, clients to make decisions and ultimately benefit everyone in the community. This also serves to align interests because in addition to the possibility of winning, participants are also gaining useful feedback about their work, which they would not get in pure competition formats (how most “Crowdsourcing Creative” endeavors are structured).

The end result is that the Jovoto community behaves like a software development and design community like WordPress, where the open source licensing has made this interaction possible – Jovoto is getting the benefits of this interaction, while preserving the ability for work to be licensed.

Some of the challenges include:

• How will the community scale across different languages?

• How will Jovoto work alongside existing advertising agencies?

• Will people continue participating if they don’t win?

• How will competitive issues be managed – for example, if I am fashion brand and I see a competition for another fashion brand, why could I not simply create an account and observe the ideas, winners, etc?