The March issue of The
Harvard Business Review has in interview with Martin Sorrell. At one point the interviewer asks whether
crowdsourced ads and algorithms are the future model of advertising. Sir Martin’s response is interesting:
You are tapping into the knowledge and the information of
people all over the world. That’s
fantastic. And the power of the web is that it opens up and plumbs people’s
minds and mines all their knowledge. But
somebody has to assess it, and you can’t do that with an algorithm. There’s a
judgment call here. That’s the problem I
see: Ultimately, somebody still has to decide what is the best piece of
knowledge or the big idea that you got from the crowd. If you don’t get that
right, it fails.