I've known James Sherrett for several years now. We met when he was in Calgary for a conference (not through anything to do with crowdsourcing, which is kind of funny). Recently, I was surprised to learn that he wrote a novel a few years ago. Not a bull-shitty marketing book, but a real, honest-to-goodness piece of fiction. How cool is that? I'm not going to lie, finding out stuff like this is one of the reasons I'm loving this blog :)

Sarah: How did you come up with the idea for AdHack?
James: I was a frustrated ad buyer who wanted a better way to do digital advertising. We needed to work fast and deliver great campaigns in days and weeks. Everyone in advertising was talking about the next quarter and the quarter after. It was impossible! So I started out to solve my own problem and build an ad agency that worked like the web -- fast, flexible, responsive. Now we have 1,000+ people in 21 countries.

Sarah: What did you do before this?
James: I ran the Internet marketing, content and web development teams for Intrawest where we sold vacations to places like Whistler and Cancun. Yes, I got a season's pass at Whistler. Then I did the same for Teligence where we sold phone 'entertainment.' Yes, there were late night ads featuring Evangeline Lilly. Before all that I wrote a novel. I guided fishermen.

Sarah: What's your favorite project that you've worked on?
James: Hugh Jackman is the global spokesperson for Lipton Ice Tea. He'd done a great ad called Tokyo Hotel Dancing that blew up all over the world. Lipton Ice Tea (and their agency DDB Paris) worked with us on an open casting call on YouTube for folks to submit videos and get cast with Hugh Jackman on the sequel ad. We did the project in 9 European countries and 8 languages and it was amazing how people responded. We got tons of entries. Then we started getting parody videos of the first ad. People had incredible passion for the project.

Sarah: What's the most interesting thing about working with AdHack clients?
James: The range of problems we get to solve. It's an awesome challenge. Some days we're creating teams to build apps for the iPad. The next day we're organizing teams for a global beer brand's event coverage across North America. Another day we're recruiting filmmakers to remix a global TV ad to redistribution. We've found some really solid basics of process and approach to work across these projects, but the projects always amaze with their diversity.

Sarah: Why do you think people are turning to crowdsourcing?
James: I think the bigger picture is that people are responding to the huge flood of digital content that we're all immersed in today. They're finding just like us that an open, collaborative, curated process, working with their customers and advocates, is the best technique to swim with the flood and influence its path. Crowdsourcing is one name for that response.

Sarah: Where do you see this industry going in the next year or two?
James: I think the biggest change we're seeing in advertising now and continuing over the next 5-10 years is the "80 / 20 flip." Here's the 30 second overview:

It used to be the standard rule that you made an ad and repeated the heck out of it. That's a model for mass media and why you see the same ads over and over. The ad (creative) was 20 percent of the budget and the space / time to run it (media) was 80 percent of the budget. That ratio is in the process of flipping. The 'creative' part of advertising is exploding in size and complexity: In size because we're living in a world of media abundance where replication costs are near 0; in complexity because we're in what I call a 'smoosh' time where our digital world includes all types of media: video, images, audio, software, text. All of that (with more coming) can be ads.

So crowdsourcing in advertising is a response to recruit more people to build more stuff to meet the demand for more creative in a world affected by the 80 / 20 flip.

Thanks for sharing with us James! If you'd like to know more about James, you can follow him or his company on Twitter. If you'd like to learn more about the 80 / 20 flip, he's got that on his blog. If you'd like to buy his novel, it's right here.