Don Draper, look away. London-based blur Group has officially launched its Creative Services Exchange, which in their words aims to disrupt the traditional Madison Avenue agency model for the advertising/creative industries. And in doing so, cuts down time to market and, of course, costs.
It’s the usual Internet take on an old industry: offer a platform that more or less cuts out the middle person (unless you’re the blur Group), matching buyers with sellers directly. In this instance, the middle person is expensive creative agencies, while the buyers are those with a creative brief – web design, copy writing, marketing campaign, viral video and such – and the sellers are professional creatives. All 9,500 of them vetted by the blur Group themselves.
The process itself works as follows: buyers upload a brief, which again is screened by blur, with a predetermined price. The site them accepts pitches from its database of “creatives” and blur shortlists the best/most appropriate three. The buyer then makes the final call, with blur Group taking a commission on each brief traded.
“It’s now possible to trade Creative Services in the same way as oil, gold and company shares”, says blur, which isn’t strictly true since there’s still a heavy degree of human screening on blur’s part and that doesn’t scale to Internet-efficient standards. In other words, this is no eBay.
Blur Group is also announcing the launch of its weekly blur Group Index (bGI). The Index aggregates all the activity in each of the markets that make up the Creative Services Exchange: design, marketing, media, artwork and innovation, with the aim to deliver regular insight into creative spend, media use and marketing practices of businesses “across the globe.”