Crowdsourcing is one of the fundamental cogs in BrandPotion, and it's great to see this concept gaining ground online and offline.

Crowdsourcing isn't a new concept. In fact, we're willing to bet you've come across it for a while now. Heard of Wikipedia? The online encyclopaedia is one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing, using the power of the World Wide Web to solicit articles from people around the planet. There are a reported 70,000 ‘hot' authors who contribute to Wikipedia. Today, Wikipedia hosts over 3.1 million articles in English alone, and articles can be uploaded in over 260 different languages.

But crowdsourcing hasn't been limited to the accumulation of information. Case in point: Netflix. The online movie rental service held a competition inviting participants to better the site's existing movie recommendation system by 10 percent. The competition was opened to anyone who wasn't connected to Netflix or a resident of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar or Sudan. People flocked from around the world to play for the grand million-dollar prize.

But a strange turn of events found two of the leading teams-BellKor (a team of AT&T scientists) and BigChaos (a team of Austrian scientists)-combine their efforts to form BellKor in BigChaos, to better their chances of winning the competition. Opening their internal problem up to the world proved to be Netflix's biggest gain, bigger than the 10.05 percent improvement over their previous algorithm.

Even advertising agencies have started using crowdsourcing. Agency Nil is a good example; they've begun crowdsourcing the work of bringing clients in, offering 10 percent of the first revenue from a referral as a reward.

The contests on BrandPotion are experiments in crowdsourcing themselves. Putting an advertising brief in the hands of the general public, we're aiming to showcase the magic of crowdsourcing as it works in each brand's favour.