Jovoto.com : Exploiting talent and diluting the value of your work.
$5.81 per hour for design contracting? Where do I sign up!?
For those who don’t know, Jovoto.com is a collaboration platform for designers to submit creative work to companies looking for good ideas for viral marketing, website designs, new brand identities or new ad campaigns. Designers from all over the world then put forth their best efforts with the hopes that the company will choose their work. Along the way, other community members submit feedback on your work, giving you a chance to make revisions and improve upon your idea before the official judging period begins.
The reward is a cash prize, usually in the ballpark of $5,000 for the sold idea, and smaller cash prizes for the top ideas as ranked by the community.
Sounds nice, right? I thought so, which is why when I heard about the BetaCup challenge, a contest sponsored by Starbucks to generate ideas on how to reduce paper cup waste, I joined Jovoto. The prize for the sold idea in this contest was $10,000.
In the early days of the 2 month submission period, the community was helpful, energetic, and excited to be able to help tackle this problem of paper cup waste. Before long, there were 440 ideas submitted. Many people in the community spend countless hours refining their ideas (which ranged from reusable cup incentive programs, to recycling programs, to collapsible and biodegradable cups). Some members created prototypes of their cup designs, some spent hours researching technical requirements, market factors, surveying customers, designing video campaigns, and so much more. All of this on top of the hours spent promoting your idea within the community, collaborating with other members, and providing feedback on all of the other ideas.
It was everything Jovoto had envisioned when they created their community platform.
After all of this effort by so many creative individuals, a winner was selected. The idea that will change the world, the one selected as best from all of the technical and creative experts within the community, the one that made it to the top of the mountain after thousands of hours spent by the community, the one that will eliminate 58 billion paper cups wasted every year!?!??
A chalkboard.
Yes. A chalkboard.
But not just any chalkboard! This chalkboard keeps track of people who bring a travel mug into Starbucks. Every tenth person who brings in their own travel mug gets a free cup of coffee! Yay. How innovative.
Clearly, Starbucks chose this idea because it was cheap to implement. Many other travel mug incentive ideas included RFID and integration with social media… but that costs money. Yes, I do think the chalkboard will work to a small degree on a local level, but it’s hardly the global, innovative solution that BetaCup advertised it was searching for.
From the BetaCup briefing:
Rethink the way we consume coffee and present solutions that strive to reduce paper cup waste.Think beyond just the vessel for carrying coffee, and develop a way to cause behavior change at a massive scale.
The final blow was that the winner did not spend any time in the community, didn’t rate or provide feedback on anyone else’s ideas. They simply submitted their idea and disappeared.
What I learned from the BetaCup challenge:
Jovoto exploits its talented community and dilutes the value of creative work.
Think about it this way. Starbucks put up $20,000 for prize money, and paid Jovoto for the right to leverage their community platform. Let’s assume that on average, each of the 430 entrants spent 8 hours on their entry (a conservative estimate based on those I had communicated with). That adds up to 3440 hours spent by the community on this project, meaning Starbucks paid $5.81 per hour for creative work.
$5.81 per hour? They pay 16-year-olds more than that to pour coffee.
Out of 430 submissions, only 6 ideas were awarded prizes, leaving 424 people who just spent thousands of hours combined on speculative design, with nothing to show for their efforts. (Why speculative design is wrong.)
How much money Jovoto was paid by Starbucks (et al) is unknown, but Jovoto earns enough to staff offices in New York and Berlin.
Imagine working for a design studio that would only compensate you if their clients liked your work, oh, and you have 400 other designers to compete with. You probably wouldn’t work there for very long, or you’d starve and be homeless in no time. But this is essentially what Jovoto is doing, selling their clients a stable of talented designers who work for nothing under the facade of “community”.
This model not only hurts those participating in the contests, but artificially lowers the cost of design services for everyone else. If a company can pay $5000 for 100 Jovoto designers, why pay a design firm $25,000 for 5?
My advice? Don’t use Jovoto. But if you do, don’t spend more than an hour on any contest, and definitely don’t bother participating in the community, their clients don’t care how great of a community member you are, and it doesn’t help your chances of winning.
Thanks for taking the time for such an in depth analysis of the contest. This is well researched - yet, there are some quite relevant mistakes I feel like I should clarify!
First of all, it is absolutely important to understand that at jovoto, it’s not designs that are being created, but CONCEPTS. Any concept, which gets chosen for realization, is paid a license fee, and of course only THEN will the design work kick off! So this process actually CREATES design jobs and does not lower the cost of design services.
We appreciate constructive criticism because its people such as yourself who make jovoto a better platform. That said, you had mentioned prize money, that the prize for a Sold Idea in this contest was 10,000$. To clarify, the 10,000$ Award was a Jury recognition, a prize money not connected to any rights transfer.
To your criticism of the idea that won: I agree it’s a little surprising that the jury chose a concept so simple and, at first glance, not very spectacular. But, The jury consists of people with a vast experience in thinking about sustainability and finding practicable solutions (People like Graham Hill of Treehugger.com) They chose this concept with the explanation that it is simple, requires a minimum of resources, creates a sense of community AND is effective in solving the problem AND can be implemented almost instantly. I totally respect this decision. If you look at how the community decided, you see some more elaborated concepts there, with intelligent cup designs, return-schemes and communication concepts, all of which the Jury and Starbucks have found interesting and are still in the process of evaluating.
Some more background on jovoto, a platform created about 2 years ago by Students of the University of the Arts in Berlin. It’s absolutely our goal to offer a fair and sustainable service for creatives, a service with real benefits and job opportunities. Unlike you suggest, our business relies not only on running contest - our development team is actively engaged in project work beyond the jovoto platform.
Of course, in a contest model, not everyone can win. But it is up to you how much time you invest, and, the Karma Cup example shows; simple ideas can go a long way. In this case, it is sad that the Karma Cup authors did not engage with the community more actively, on the other hand it was not the purpose of the Jury to reward community activity. We have other mechanisms for that!
Long-time engagement and community-spirited behavior IS valued on jovoto and we offer people who have proven their talent and community spirit to move on to other collaboration formats.
In a changing market, things aren’t as simple as your calculation model. jovoto works because it lowers entry barriers for creatives, connects them with brands and organizations in an effective and flexible structure. And we’re constantly evolving to meet new needs.
As most companies, we are always accepting to feedback and I hope this clarifies your initial concerns.
I hope to have been able to give you some more perspective on what jovoto is about.
with kind regards,Nadine - jovoto Community Management