Campaign Magazine: Ideasicle X Aims to Enhance Remote Creative Collaboration
Note: full article originally appeared in Campaign US here.
The platform facilitates collaboration between creative teams on a blog-like stream.
Ideasicle X, a new freelance and collaboration platform for agencies, launched on Monday as a subscription-based product for the remote work age.
The platform connects agencies with freelancers or internal talent for specific projects and helps them brainstorm better remotely by collaborating on ideas in a blog-like stream.
Agencies can upload creative briefs directly to the platform and set a time period and parameters for the project, while directly inviting employees or freelancers with the right skill sets.
The platform then selects four freelancers from the database who “accept” the job to collaborate on the process using a blog-like stream.
Groups can post ideas on the platform from any device and include videos and photos. Agencies can monitor the process in real time and comment to build on ideas. Once the process is complete, agencies can download ideas as pdfs or access them through their archives. They can also pay freelancers directly through the platform.
The platform is more effective than crowdsourcing tools because it facilitates teamwork, said CEO Will Burns, a former executive at agencies including Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Arnold and MullenLowe.
“With crowdsourcing, who knows how many unvetted masses out there are looking at your brief,” he said. “They're all competing against each other for the ‘winning idea,’ so there's a lot of wasted creative time. With this, it's all about teamwork. It's all about trying to get to the best idea possible.”
The platform is currently limited to groups of four because it makes for the best sessions, Burns said.
“I thought that if I get a bunch of brilliant people to come up with individual ideas, then we'll have a great presentation for our clients,” Burns said. “But people clammed up when there were too many others in the virtual space.”
David Baldwin, founder and CEO of advertising agency Baldwin&, which beta-tested the platform, agreed, saying that the platform has helped democratize ideas at his agency.
“Personality starts to take over and you get the louder personality shutting down the quiet personality. But the quiet personality might have a great idea,” he said. “People can react to ideas on the merit of the idea itself, and riff off of it in a way that's really powerful.”
Will Burns is founder and CEO of Ideasicle X. Follow him on Twitter @WillOBurns.