A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Francois Petavy, CEO, eYeka.
When a large, fast-moving consumer goods company had in mind a couple of years ago to develop a new type of toothbrush—one that would potentially interact with a smartphone—it did not turn to its own marketing team for ideas. Instead, it looked to Francois Petavy and his company, eYeka, for inspiration.
Petavy sent the query out to his network: “How would you revolutionize oral care with the first connect tooth brush"? Thousands of so-called creators connected with eYeka, a crowdsourcing marketing company. Some 70 designs came in from all over the world. One entry, from a Chinese girl, Petavy says, contained 20 Power Point slides and a proposed app that would record how long one brushed their teeth; another idea included a “Guitar Hero”-type set-up, whereby music would stop playing if you brushed in one spot for too long.
This notion of marketing not just for the masses, but by the masses, is the driving force behind CEO Petavy’s vision at eYeka, which exists to connect brands and creative individuals with ideas for new products, or new ways in which to use a product. “Consumers are moving very fast, so brands have to catch up,” says Petavy. “Seeing the future is even more important for [brands] now, because they have to see a future before people get there, and actually, people are there already.”
Petavy says that since brands are unable to reach people in the same ways as they could just a few years ago—shifts to social media are a huge change, for instance—companies are “moving away from marketing to people. [It will be] marketing with people, going forward.”
That’s where eYeka comes in. Founded in 2006, eYeka was created to bridge the gap between name-brand companies and products with an online community of more than 300,000 individuals, who offer innovative solutions and fresh ideas in response to queries fielded by eYeka’s customers. These include some of the world’s largest and best-known corporations, such as Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Hyundai and Coca-Cola, among others.
The trend toward crowdsourcing ideas for marketing products is on the rise, Petavy says—some 85% of the world’s largest brands have either used crowd-sourcing for innovation or promotional and eYeka is in the sweet-spot. The venture-backed firm, with locations in Paris and Singapore, says doubled between 2013 and 2014.
“The core idea behind this is that good ideas can come from anywhere, and we turbo-charge that,” Petavy says. “Everyone is invited.” eYeka’s online creators can be found in 160 countries, speaking dozens of languages; most of eYeka’s business comes from the Asia-Pacific region.
eYeka’s online community of problem-solvers is divided among their areas of expertise—product design, innovation, content video, print ads and so on. When eYeka’s clients submit a query, such as the interactive toothbrush idea, eYeka works with the brand to translate their marketing objective into a creative challenge that a mass consumer would understand and find fun to participate in.
eYeka also advises on the duration of the competition, the terms & conditions for participation, the level of confidentiality and the prize pool to motivate participants. Once all of this has been agreed upon by a brand, eYeka pings its creators with the question. For each query, Petavy says eYeka receives on average 70 to 100 responses.
The overall scheme, Petavy says, is run as a competition, where community members chose which projects they want to participate in. eYeka actively manages the contest and community to ensure a high number of quality entries with the winning ideas becoming part of the product development process, campaign development, or even used as a featured content piece in the final marketing campaign – in addition to receiving prize money.
eYeka makes money by acting as a strategic agency/brand partner to curate content and advise on execution. Clients pay eYeka a fee for setting-up and managing a project from end to end, they also pay the prizes to the community. eYeka advises its clients on the incentive mechanism for each project, and the agreed incentives are directly paid out to winning community members. At the end of the competition, eYeka analyzes the entries for thematic and semiotic interpretation and delivers an actionable report, along with a copy of all entries to their clients. eYeka also guides clients on how they can either amplify their content and maximize their return on media investment, or implement ideas from the community with partners to fulfill their marketing objectives.
“This is a disruptive principle,” Petavy says, adding that brands usually focus on the target audience to get information and use that information to develop new products. But with eYeka, he says, “if you’re not in the target market and the target audience, we love you, because maybe you’re going to find something perfectly new, groundbreaking, because you’ll be looking at the problem from a completely new angle and maybe you can bring something to the equation.”
Petavy says eYeka’s aim is not to replace advertising agencies or in-house marketing teams, because “you still need experts who know the history of a brand, and know how to orchestrate a global campaign,” he says. Instead, eYeka aims to jump-start the creative process at big corporations, bringing a new tool to the innovation toolbox. The hope, says Petavy, is to “actually maximize your creative output and get, in the end, much better creative results, but from the collaboration between the crowd and the experts.”
An engineer by training with a management MBA from INSEAD, Petavy, a native of France, has worked at technology companies for much of his career. Out of college he developed content for Ubisoft’s best-selling video game series, Rayman. He later spent time at eBay, running its French marketplace and development. He joined as eYeka’s CEO in 2008.
Petavy sees nothing but growth in this area of marketing. “I see big changes right now. I would call it the consumerization of marketing from the marketer’s standpoint. And that fact that as consumers, sometimes we’re better equipped with the tools we have and the collaborative economy than as professionals,” he says. “And I see that coming in the marketing world.”
