Mon­day Note uses the case study of LG elic­it­ing designs for future mobile phones to show how crowd­sourc­ing is chang­ing how design is done… and how it’s start­ing to change adver­tis­ing, too.

Alto­gether, LG is going to spend $75,000, to be dis­trib­uted among 43 awards. […] Let’s face it: for a com­pany such as LG, seventy-five grand for what could lead to a rev­o­lu­tion­ary phone design is pocket change. For a tenth or a fifti­eth of the cost of a clas­si­cal business-to-business com­pe­ti­tion, LG will end up with a vast array of proposals. […]

[Crowd­sourc­ing] is a pow­er­ful defla­tion engine for the design world. […] The process prices tra­di­tional design firms out, it weak­ens their erst­while pric­ing power. Among these firms, only the light­est struc­tures will agree to bid for the LG design job in the hope of win­ning and thus being able to estab­lish a direct con­tact with the cell phone maker. Oth­ers, big­ger firms, are used to ask for stratos­pheric retain­ers (in the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars) sim­ply to con­sider the brief. Such enti­ties are defin­i­tively out of the game; they will stare in des­per­a­tion as an increas­ing num­ber of saving-obsessed big com­pa­nies migrate to a new genre.