Last week, Chaordix sponsored the Boston Ad Club’s “All About Crowdsourcing” event, where I was honored to meet and introduce the two speakers John Winsor and Edward Boches – both very highly regarded thought leaders in the innovation space.  Edward hosted a lively session in one-on-one format with John providing commentary before turning to the crowd for Q+A.    Kudos to the Ad Club for running a great event with live #adclub Twitter-feeds to the monitors all around the room and quick switching to any sites the speakers mentioned.

It was an enlightening event for me in many ways.   First, I was surprised that many of the people I spoke with seemed to have little or no understanding of what crowdsourcing is all about.  This is despite the majority of them coming from advertising and creative firms.  I guess crowdsourcing isn’t quite as close to mainstream as I thought.  Second, while the crowd posed lots of the typical questions we hear daily – How do you build your crowd?  How much does it cost?  What’s the ROI?  -  the longest discussion was about the perceived threat that crowdsourcing could essentially outsource creative jobs- i.e. many of the jobs represented in the room.

Certainly any new technology that has landscape-changing capacity such as crowdsourcing will be a double-edged sword of sorts – it won’t be positive for everyone, but the benefits so greatly outweigh the negatives that there isn’t any question where its heading.At the event, Edward said “crowdsourcing is here to stay” and I agree.

While sites like iStockphoto and crowdSpring are making some professional photographers and designers change their business models, their benefits to the market as a whole are tremendous and they are giving thousands of small shop photographers and designers instant exposure and credibility. Plus, there are far more companies using crowdsourcing as a better, faster, more economical way to gain innovation, market input, feedback and prediction, than there are creating sites that might threaten jobs.

In fact, I’ll go all the way to say that to the “professional creative” crowd – crowdsourcing may soon become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal.   What better way to test market reaction and acceptance some of the new creative ideas you are coming up with prior to spending hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of your client’s media budget?

So let’s stop focusing on “design contests” that seem like hours of work for nothing. Instead, let’s focus on the opportunity for the advertising and creative community to find a way to invite the crowd in to their business that produces market relevant brands, faster and more economically but ensures that everyone involved is being rewarded.