Rhiz.Antho.Us

Crowdsourced Advertising Agencies use the power of the internet to allow thousand of content creators to generate thousands of ideas for use in advertising. How agencies utilize the crowd varies greatly.

• How does rhiz differ from other Crowdsourced Advertising Agencies?

  For us, crowdsourcing's strength for advertising is all about taking things viral (more about crowdsourcing and viral advertising at the bottom). And that can't be done by just running a contest where everyone competes for a single payout and only one idea ever gets released (which is entirely how older crowdsouring advertising agencies run things).

  
  

  Instead we use a pay-per-performance model and release all the ideas.

• Why is a pay-per-performance model so substantial?

  Older crowdsourcing agencies showed you and only you, the ideas they came up with. People who used the service quickly found out that the slogan "You don't have to create a great idea; you just have to spot it" didn't work out so well. It was almost as hard to spot a good idea as it was to come up with one.
  

  Some agencies responded by restricting the idea creators to more elite, professional advertisers. This didn't work either, and it started to look more smallgroupsourcing than crowdsourcing (smallgroupsourcing probably won't make it as a buzzword). It increased the cost of the program and selected a group of people who have less time to devote to something like a crowdsourced advertising campaign.

  
  

  How these agencies completely avoided what was staring them in the face is difficult to understand. The problem wasn't who made the videos. The problem was that one guy had to determine what a group of people would like best. This left out the obvious solution: determining what people will like is best left up to the people.

  
  

  The idea that one guy would select one product also does not reflect the way that the web is changing business. Single payout programs operate under a single marketing mindset. The idea that in the end we will have one winner flies in the face of recent scholarship like "The Long Tail" a book detailing how the web has changed the 80-20 rule so that it now is more profitable to sell less of more. Having advertisements that people actually have to search for, offers you the ability to offer multiple divergent lines of advertising appealing to multiple population strata at the same time.

  
  

  With rhiz, we made the conscious decision early on that releasing all the ideas into the wild would be a much better representation of what will succeed and what will not. Consider it "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" for advertising campaigns and just like the real world the result is not a single creature but diversity.

  
  

  Rhiz is that smorgasbord of advertising that reflects that diversity of your products and services.

• What's the difference in a sentence?

  Older crowdsourcing agencies just come up with ideas; we test them!

  
  

  We show you how many people looked at each video, how the viewers rated the video, what viewers are saying about the video, where the viewers are coming from (who is linking to the video), where the video has been embedded, and what other videos were created in response to the video.

• Whoa, don't consumer created videos pose risk?

  We won't lie to you. Yes, online video pose risk; tons of it. But it's an inherent risk; a risk that exists whether or not you decide to use rhiz. Right now there is probably some online, consumer created video about your company that is very, very negative. Rhiz gives you the ability to commission a ton of positive viral videos and reduce the likelihood that someone will see only that negative video.

• What do you do to mitigate risk?

  Crowdsourcing something certainly opens you up to the risk of bad ideas, but we mitigate that risk several ways:

  
  

  First, we don't release videos to the public, the public releases videos. This is a major distinction and a difference in thinking from older crowdsourcing advertising agencies. A viewer will never be able to tell if what they are watching is an advertisement or just a video; if you paid for that video or if someone made it for free. This means that you have plausible deniability per video.

  
  

  Secondly, if you think a video portrays you negatively we won't make you pay for it (and we will give the producer 72 hours to either have it removed from the video hosting site; if the content creator doesn't remove the offending video we will never use that video creator again). So, you have way more control (the ability to "kill" a video) than any online videos currently being made about you.

  
  

  Third, we don't release a list of clients and we don't release which videos were made by rhiz video producers and what videos were made by other people (unless you want us to). This means that you have ultimate deniability; you never have to say you used our services and we won't say we did anything for you (unless you want us to). You can create stealth advertising campaigns and advertise under the radar. To the viewer, it simply looks like everyone is talking about your product. It blurs the lines between what is an advertisement and is a personal recommendation; it's the ultimate viral or buzz campaign.

  
  

  The buzz of a viral campaign is the biggest difference: older crowdsourcing advertising agencies assumed that would revolutionize the way TV advertising would be done, and then stopped there.

  
  

  Rhiz has taken that idea and ran with it to the moon. Crowdsourcing advertising's idea generation is the opportunity to create tons of viral campaigns, vastly improve your mentions in the blogosphere, and create a groundswell that can vastly improve your organic search rankings, give you a huge presence in social media, and, then, revolutionize the way that your TV advertising is done.

  
  

  Rhiz is the future of advertising. It is the link between new media and old. It's not just "using the internet to create TV advertising;" it's online advertising that crates buzz marketing, better search rankings, viral campaigns, and TV advertising.