BBH Offers Just $1,500 for New Logo Design; Creatives Infuriated

(MoneyWatch)  Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty is staging a competition for anyone who wants to design a new logo for its "global innovations unit" BBH Labs. The prize? $1,500. Designers are asked to submit only rough comps before the decision over the final work is made.

The move has sparked some anger. The Denver Egotist says:

You fuckin' serious? The very fact that you're running a contest means you support undercutting the market value of designers. This is a greatly respected advertising agency that has just pissed in the face of every designer on the planet by offloading their logo assignment to some shite crowdsourcing site. How many great designers are out of work right now that would have gladly taken the project? How many great designers would work on the project just because it's for BBH? $1,500 for a logo? Shit's sorry and it's caused us to greatly reconsider the respect we once had for this shop.

The Denver Egotist is wrong. Here's why. Creativity is quickly being commodified by better software and the internet, lowering its price dramatically. It used to be the case that agencies were forced to pay high salaries to skilled individuals who knew all about typefaces, white space and kerning. But now, with free programs like GIMP and even free-er web sites, any 15-year-old can design art or objects that approach professional quality, from their bedrooms.

This gives clients a choice: Pay a lot of money for design of 100 percent professional quality, or pay almost no money for design of 90 percent professional quality.

The financial decision wins out; average quality may suffer, but not by much, and the increasing ease with which technology can be applied to improve quality will actually erase that disadvantage over time.

This is an important economic dynamic that most creatives -- designers, writers, photographers, everyone -- have yet to grasp. The web makes creativity abundant, not unique, and therefore cheap or free.

This is the logic that BBH seems to have realized.* This is the context for BBH's design competition. Unsurprisingly, it isn't going as smoothly as it would have done had they hired Duffy & Partners (or even themselves). BBH's Adam Glickman:*

... many of the designs being presented seem to be slapped together without much care or thought. As a client, it is taking considerable time to filter through, which adds a cost to the bottom line of my company. Our initial interest in Crowdspring is an attempt to find young talent, so I accept this process as more efficient than if we had to conduct portfolio reviews in the analog world.

Well duh! You're only offering $1,500 for rough comps -- how much care and thought were you expecting? But it's nice to see that Glickman realizes that he's a client in a trade-off: More work and lower quality for an even lower price.

* See comments section below for Glickman's response to this post. Hat tip to AgencySpy.