WITN: Extraordinary Chickpeas and the Madness of Crowdsourcing

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded. She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos... → Learn More

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Not our words, but those of Charles Mackay, author of the 1841 classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Still, it would be safe to say that we’ve always been a little skeptical of the benefits of crowd sourcing, whether for science, art or literature.

On the other side of the fence, sits Peter LaMotte. Peter is president of GeniusRocket, a platform that allows brands to crowdsource commercial and (they hope) viral videos from a closed (but vast) community of filmakers, animators and other similarly creative folks. We like Peter – for reasons outlined here and here – and so we figured if anyone could convince us that the future of creative endeavor lies with monkeys and typewriters it would be him.

Did he succeed? The video is below.

(And do watch to the end – there’s a bit with a naked chickpea puppet.)

Company: GeniusRocket
Website: geniusrocket.com
Launch Date: September 1, 2007

GeniusRocket is a small creative firm that creates creative video advertising content. They use a unique platform with a staged, curated and client-driven project selection, collaboration, and production process, utilizing a fully vetted community of creative professionals. In 2007, GeniusRocket pioneered the crowdsourcing space, building a community of more than 15,000 creative professionals. In 2011, after running hundreds of projects, they left the contest world for a different, improved model. Today, GeniusRocket’s model brings together parts of the crowdsourcing world...

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