Subject Matter Expert

11 Video crowdsourcing platforms to help boost authenticity for your brand

With the world completely digital for much of last year, more and more brands are turning to crowdsourcing to create their content.

As the cheaper and more risk-averse option for brands, crowdsourced video content removes the complications associated with onset teams from a cash flow and travel perspective, and also allows for a more authentic marketing experience for customers. 

Providing more personalised and consumer-centric content, how do brands know which platforms to use and how they can get the most out of crowdsourcing their content? We’ve pulled together some of the top crowdsourced video content platforms below.

Whilst this is not an all-inclusive list, it gives an insight into some of the main players in this emerging market…

90 seconds are a global video creation platform, allowing brands to create quality videos anywhere in the world. They revolutionise the way video production is managed by simplifying the complexity of video production. This is achieved through unique technology, including an end-to-end suite of collaboration tools, which helps brands connect and track offline video shoots back to an automated online workflow. 

For multi-location remote shoots and on-demand multi-format editing, to executing global content strategies anywhere in the world, 90 Seconds has provided video creation solutions for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Their client list includes major brands such as Amazon, Accenture and Bupa.

Catch&Release solves a specific problem that touches almost every creative, producer and content creator in the production industry today: they make it easy to discover and curate the best content from the open web, and make it available for licensing to agencies and brands worldwide.

They provide a first-to-market licensing platform for the creative production industry. Using Catch&Release, advertisers can work more efficiently, and save time and money, by tapping into the Internet’s unlimited supply of already existing, “found” content–photos, videos and graphics made by individual creators, from professional photographers and graphic artists to everyday people.  

The San Francisco-based company works with the likes of Apple, Google, and Airbnb, as well as ad agencies.  This Spring they also announced that they raised an additional $14 million in Series A funding, bringing their total funding to $26 million.

With a focus on optimising time and budgets, their mission is to help brands move away from stock imagery and provide meaning and range to brand aesthetics. This was a matter Producers & Procurers also discussed with founder, Analisa Goodin,here. Seeing ‘authenticity as your superpower’, they want to make cost-effectiveness a superpower too.  

BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, first launched FlareStudio in 2013 to meet the rising demand for diverse and authentic video content. Its remit was simple – take BBDO convincingly into the content arena, efficiently deliver on any BBDO brands’ needs for content, and provide great work that is effective. 

The initiative gives clients access to a pool of talent and the crowdsourced service is built on a system of tiers (Open Studio, Studio Plus and Studio Pro), which can deliver content to fit different solutions and budgets for clients.

Since its inception it has now created hundreds of films, generated 10s of millions of earned views, and won a long and wide range of internationally acclaimed awards.

According to their website, clients include PepsiCo, Diageo, P&G and Sainsbury’s.

Genero aims to help marketers faced with ‘impossible expectations’ and is a professional network offering brands and creatives the chance to work together in a streamlined way. 

They collaborate with the world’s largest professional creative network to generate fresh creative thinking and video content. Essentially, brands can post a brief and receive detailed pitches from creatives around the world to explore.

Often, Genero is used to bolster in-house marketing teams and offers a way to save time and budgets by working with creatives in a leaner and streamlined way.

Some of their recent work includes Nespresso’s 5th edition of Nespresso Talents, a global celebration of creative filmmaking which challenges creators around the world to test their creativity with stories told through vertical short films. They also worked with Fitbit to provide an agile creative model for their marketing services structure.

Mofilm connects brands with a diverse community of over 10,000 creators from around the world to produce authentic and culturally relevant stories. 

They curate and oversee the entire process and deliver award-winning content produced by a team of ex-agency professionals.

They work with some of the world’s biggest brands, including CocaCola and American Express, and worked with the Unilever brand Cornetto to produce their famous ‘Cupidity’ crowdsourced video campaign back in 2015.

They are also part of You & Mr. Jones, the world’s first BrandTech group, on a mission to make every part of the brand-building process better, faster and cheaper through technology.

Shootsta is a subscription-based, scalable video solution, educating and empowering brands to create high-quality, cost-effective videos – in just 24 hours.

At Shootsta, they have a video-at-scale model. A hybrid product – they’ve built a purpose-built Shootsta Kit, creative training, cloud-based Shootsta Hub and professional editing. The idea is that their model enables businesses everywhere to shoot, upload and share their ‘always-on’​ video content.

With a global team in London, Sydney, San Diego, Singapore and Hong Kong, they are driving video innovation by building a growth space for teams, being a love brand for clients – and making video production accessible to all. The aim is that everyone can create video stories that resonate.

Founded in 2012 in San Francisco, SmartShoot has thousands of professional photographers and filmmakers in their community, and over 200,000 successful on-location appointments under their belts, they are an expert network that connect people with brands. 

SmartShoot helps brands shoot compelling photos and videos in thousands of locations to their brand guidelines. They hand-select professional photographers & videographers and provide best-practices, training, assignment, project management, scalable quality assurance, integrated delivery, tax compliance and payment tools. 

Their clients range from individuals and small businesses to some of the world’s premier brands, including BMW, Expedia, YouTube and Yelp.

Tongal is an independent creative network which helps creatives showcase their talent and removes gatekeepers of content. 

With an open content production methodology, businesses post project ideas in short 140-character descriptions, and the platform allows anyone to contribute from ideation to production. They currently have around 50,000 members worldwide and have testimonials from brands such as Lego and PayPal.

One of Tongal’s most famous pieces of work include their campaign for Pringles, which met with the world of Star Wars. As Co-Founder & President of Tongal, James DeJulio, explains, “This was a big win for us and for Pringles. It showed that our platform and community could deliver on some of the most valuable IP in this (or any) galaxy”.

Working with world’s biggest brands, Tongal clients tend to know what they want to achieve and have an open mind of how they can get there, both in terms of process and cost. 

The video advertising company,VidMob, raised $25 million in a Series B funding back in 2019, and continues to grow year on year. Again, You & Mr. Jones is also an investor in VidMob and they have recently won awards for their work: Glossy Award, Best Use of Video by a Brand for work with Neutrogena, and Instagram Stories Partner Innovation Award for work with Michael Kors.

Using a data-driven approach, their Agile Creative Studio platform focuses on the measurability of creative content: something that has been increasingly relevant as purse strings are tightened and ROI is paramount. 

Supplying volume and speed, they have worked with some of the most influential marketers. For example, they worked alongside Kim Kardashian West’s eyewear line (and their respective agency, NOA CORNBERG) to deliver a mobile video campaign, which delivered more than two-times the conversion rate compared to the original creative content. This demonstrates the power behind agile creativity. 

Vloggi was founded by Justin Wastnage in late 2018 with the goal of democratising video production. Their mission was to make it easy, quick and affordable for anyone to source, brand and use unique video content created by their communities.

Vloggi is a video production platform that combines a smart video upload tool with sophisticated cloud-based video automation tools for businesses to manipulate and license this content.

Through the combination of micro-influencer content creators (your brand advocates) and cloud-based server-side video assembly, the platform can reduce the cost of video production by a factor of one hundred.

Vloggi enables the creation of authentic video content at scale. Vloggi says it is the first crowdsourcing platform to integrate a data-led video upload tool into the ecosystem. The platform also ensures all content is licensed for re-use, eliminating the pain point of chasing IP rights.

Zooppa is a creative platform for the production of video and graphic content, and has worked with the likes of T Mobile, Bic and eHarmony.

To join the Zooppa community, creatives need to sign up and create an account and join projects by simply uploading content for free. 

The brand involved will create a brief with all the information needed to create a successful submission, and then evaluate the submissions to decide if it’s the right one for them. If a creative’s content is selected, the client will obtain the exclusive rights to their project/content and they will be free to publish it through their channels.

Working with T Mobile and their agency back in 2017 for their Simple Global campaign, Zooppa’s creative network of filmmakers created 30 to 60 second videos showcasing the most extreme moments of T Mobile user adventures. To ensure the top quality content, Zooppa identified top-tier creatives in each target market to submit videos and manage engagement.