How the Sydney Design festival poster competition went horribly wrong

Now all the entrants that did submit have done so for nothing, 100% chance of time down the drain. Ouch.

I think the real problem with this ‘competition’ was the piddling amount of prize money – which is in keeping with the ‘spirit’ of horrendously underpaid crowd sourced design. It reminds me of the Kraft endeavor to have the public propose a new name for their cheese/Vegemite concoction a few years back. History was on their side as the ‘Vegemite’ name was the result of a public competition back in the day. I was going to enter but couldn’t find details of what the prize was. I contacted Kraft and was told the prize was two tickets to the AFL grand final and the warm glow of being part of the Kraft family. WTF does being part of the Kraft family mean? I asked this probing question and never received an answer. For potentially developing a piece of key intellectual property for their global juggernaut the prize sounded like the biggest rip-off of all time. It seemed all the more exploitative given that Doritos had their make a TV ad competition where the winner stood to make $50K. Part of the Kraft family! Lousy cheapskates!

Punishment: $1000 for each and every person who submitted a design through genuine passion for the competition/opportunity, a $10000 pitch fee to a minimum 4 agencies, and then last year’s budget plus 10% for this years’ work to the winning agency.

Great article. Well written and extremely illuminating.

It’s like they read Missing Missy and then went out to recreate art in life. Impressive unintentional meta-troll.

They got what they paid for! $1,000 is a joke, and indeed incredibly insulting. What a slap in the face to the design community!

‘piddling amount of prize money’ ?!…
It’s prize money. You don’t have to enter.
Designers are underpaid even though creative agencies charge REDICULOUS amounts. Hate on agencies if anything.

Wonder how much the PHM marketing genius that came up with this cheap skate campaign get’s paid annually…

Another marketer thinking they are clever by running a ill conceived idea whilst thinking they were cleverly getting 30k in creative for a $1,000 . Insulting on many levels…

Pay peanuts get monkeys…

whats wrong with memes? PHM cant take a joke, im sure there were legitimate entries they could have awarded instead of pulling it completely.

I’m glad I didn’t waste my time entering this competition..

A piece by the Design Institute of Australia:
http://www.dia.org.au/index.cf.....038;id=102

A well written and well argued analysis.

Perhaps the ‘Client’ is devilishly brilliant.
All this free PR.
And to stop the competition before a prize is paid.
Strategy 1
Design 0

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Gloucester says…
….I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad,
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch:
Since every Jack became a gentleman
There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.

I fear that many have turned their backs upon the arts, and it may well be down to the fact that universities, having gone commercial, have taken to handing out simplified degrees in everything imaginable.

We now have more “qualified” artists walking about the streets of Los Angeles than ever existed in the Europe of Rembrandt’s time, or even Modigliani’s.

It seems that anyone who has made a bunch of friends laugh at a piss up, is suddenly a stand up comic, and anyone who can remember lines and reiterate them in the right order is an actor.

I guess it must follow that if you are half decent with a crayon or a felt tip, you must be qualified to join the ranks of Toulouse Lautrec

Crowd sourcing design work misses the value-add that comes with commercial creative. This story exposes the ignorance of those who wrote the brief, reducing a poster for a commercial purpose to something akin a kids colouring competition. Business people who have little understanding of the intricacies of marketing often assume the design process is simply a matter of creating something that “looks good”.

Commercial creative design isn’t about picking something to go on your living room wall to match your sofa. It’s a disciplined expression of a consumer proposition. Hopefully the people at the Powerhouse Museum will in future understand pretty pictures is what you spend your own money on, a design brief is an investment the client makes to achieve a commercial return.

How to get creative work for $0 – run a competition and have $1000 as the reward.

Who are they kidding?

hehe admit it guys, at least two of those were serious entries from agencies 🙂

I like the part where the Powerhouse Museum point out the Beirut Design Festival Poster Competition. What they fail to mention in their response is that the Beirut Design Festival’s branding and marketing campaign were all produced and finales by an agency well before the competition was announced.

Running a competition along side a festival is one thing. Running a poster competition to base your entire festival strategy around, is something different entirely.

It should be proportionate. There’s no reason why one creative could not join a group of creatives to collaborate at a discounted rate where all the creatives share the burden and the credit.

The problem here is this is a significant org with well-paid administrators asking the creatives to do it on the cheap. That doesn’t wash with me.

The outcome became a comment on the org’s choice.

Crowd sourcing – “say it softy and it’s almost like praying”.

I am honestly surprised to discover that this crowd-sourcing idea was a genuine attempt to get quality work. I was convinced it was Phase One in a campaign where Phase Two would have been to come out and discuss the value of what actually goes into great design.

That, IMHO, would have been a killer campaign. This, on the other hand, is so poorly thought-through as to be hard to believe. Particularly from the phm who you would assume would know an awful lot better.

I am staggered that this ever seemed like a good idea.

It’s the kinda thing you’d see on The Hollowmen.

Good write up. I have to agree it was poorly planned with entries going live anonymously. Combining that with not realizing or caring about the real insult to designers, it was a recipe for embarassment.

Btw, typo near the end. Possessive not plural, community’s.

Powerhaus Mewseum.

Weeping with laughter… genuinely…

This is hardly the first time crowdsourcing creative has backfired. Anyone remember Chevrolet allowing people to create their own online ads for the Tahoe in 2006?

Some of the more memorable ones can be found here: http://news.cnet.com/1606-2_3-6056633.html

Film Festivals such as TropFest are no better.

700 film makers pay an entry fee of $40 for the privilege of making a commissioned work for Tropfest, with film makers consuming thousands of dollars in value of labour and equipment use just for an empty promise.
On top of that they sign away up all their rights to the organisers. How crazy is that? There is no assurance that the film has even been viewed and if so by who and on what criteria

The prize is a crappy donated camera or a ticket to the US and a promise possibility of being on a SMH DVD.

700 suckers

TROPFEST

Ditto Syd.

This approach could be described as part of the, ‘feudalism of the film industry’.

It’s not new. Distributors and Agents have been acting this way for a long time.

Creatives are reduced to being treated as serfs who should be happy to work as slaves.

I feel a revolution coming on. Who’s first up against the wall?

David:
Contenders for the wall

*Withoutabox
*Any trade festival that has a pitching comp, where naive entrants give their idea to a room of idea hungry producers who have no obligation to any NDA (non-disclosure agreement). With a tacit implication that winning this will lead to fame and glory.

Personal one this:
*Commissioning editors who take one’s draft and adapt it into their pet project.

Yeah, Tropfest has always struck me as ‘hey, spend your time and money and we will decide whether to grace it with an audience’. It devalues filmmaking. People expect something great for nothing, and consequently nothing is what the filmmaking industry gets from people when we’re trying to make an actual feature film. Unless you’re Baz Luhrmann of course. Then the country will give you $80M and probably not ask for it back afterwards.

Where can i submit my poster idearz? I has sum gR8 ideas 4 sidny dezign poster. I wanna run wid the big boyz! Me is best dezigner , LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL !LOL !

i can haz dezign cheeseburgerz!!!!!! GEt iT?

But think of all that exposure you’ll get from entering the competition, and the possibility of future work, and if you are really focused and engaged we might even ask you to come in for a future presentation to our team…..Yip Yip

Did I mention that we are adding to our list of contributors ALL the time?

From the Sydney Design Poster site:

“… the Museum would have engaged the winning designer for further work and remuneration required to roll out the winning design into a more comprehensive marketing campaign.”

This sounds very much like the all too common cheapskate client who says, “You’ll get great exposure and there will be heaps of work for you in the future if you do this one job for us at this (low) price”

Really? The ‘Powerhouse Museum’ is not versed in the value of design? They are not familiar with the process involved for such a project?

I call out manipulation, or better still another classic case of carrot dangling, an all too familiar response experienced by creatives.

People if you want our ideas – in which you do – pay for them!

I think they should use the Powerhaus Mewseum poster in an ironic way. Love it