In the age of digital and social media, and in the age of realtime marketing, what matters more? The big idea or the smaller idea and execution?

Many digital agencies have been experimenting with new ways of working to try to get at those ideas and executions that a traditional agency couldn’t dream of. I was working at Organic when we rolled out the “Three Minds” initiative, meaning that for every brainstorm, we needed to have at least three people from three disciplines in the room. This is similar to what Big Spaceship has been trying to do by throwing together teams of creatives, strategists, technologists and production.

Digital agencies think that this is a point of differentiation. They think that online, social and viral are so complex that they need all this brainpower to figure it out. What ends up happening when you put a technologist and/or producer into a room with creatives? Executions. It’s a natural and inevitable thing. And I believe it’s a distraction from getting to a better and bigger idea.

Fellow Razorfisher and social media guru Shiv Singh asks, in the age of social media, do big ideas matter less? Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about how to craft my reaction to this since I first read a similar tweet from Michael Lebowitz, CEO of Big Spaceship about how the old ad agency creative partnerships are being replaced with other roles.

@bigspaceship: where(sic) putting the art director & copywriter together was the structure of the tv age, we put strategy, tech, design and production together

The quick gist is that there’s a shift towards execution versus concept. The art school I went to had a very strong and simple philosophy that it taught its students: concept is king. In crits we were always asked, “Why did you pick that typeface?” or “What is that color supposed to signify?” or “Why did you choose that style of photography?” etc. There had to be a reason for all the elements in our designs and that reason had to be rooted in the concept.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.

Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.

Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.