Tongal | Community Inspired Ads
We live in a world full of creative minds. Some creative ideas come up at random times – say in the shower or while getting a cup of coffee – and other ideas inspired at the office. Companies are constantly looking for the next way to get their brand out there, whether it may be through viral marketing campaign or through simple advertisements, but a marketing agency can only do so much. Tongal gives companies a chance to work with its creative community, all 50,000 of them, to help their next video.
“Our mission to connect the world’s creative work with the world’s creative talent. We have a built a technology platform that enables a network of 50,000 on every corner of the globe and in over 150 countries, to do work mostly video work, TV ads, ads for YouTube, mostly video-based content work for some of the biggest organizations and brands in the world,” says James De Julio, President and Co-Founder of Tongal. “We got a really unique process that lets anybody with a really good idea contribute in a 140 characters – so a tweet-sized ideas – you can actually earn money doing that.”
As James De Julio says, the whole process starts with an idea worth 140-characters and that’s phase one of their three step process. When a company comes to Tongal and seeks a creative community – with many of consumers or even fans of their products – for a new video, Tongal sets out to get companies the creative visibility they want and gives the creative community a chance to work and create an idea.
Phase one, the idea phase, allows companies to start with a brief telling the creative community what they are looking for and the community sets out to start giving ideas to the company to review. Once an idea is chosen, the winners of the idea phase gets money and the chance to earn more if their idea is turned into the winning video at the final phase as well. A company gets to see all the creative ideas
Pitch phase comes up next and allows the winners or other members to pitch ideas on how the idea will be played out and turn into a possible winning video submission. Whether the pitch is drawn up storyboard-style, shown by video, or written up, the company reviews which pitches gets to move onto the third and final phase of the project.
The last and final phase, known as the video phase, allows the winners of the pitch phase to get funding from Tongal themselves and fully engaged with bringing a winning video submission. However, to create more competition and creativity from the community, Tongal allows “Wild Card” submissions. A wild card is a submission from any member and submit videos of their own, whether using the winning idea or an idea of their own, to the company. Tongal also hands out revisions to the finalists to make sure the videos are at their best. The winning video gets to be used by the company on their website or even on TV and a cash prize.
Tongal set up a system to have both the community and companies in getting what they want. For the community, each phase produces friendly competition and gives a lot of incentive for the winner of each phase to build and complete their very own ideas. And best of all, Tongal gives work to the creative community. Whether they may be an individual amateur or a professional group, the project field is open to everyone in the community.
For the companies, Tongal helps companies meet demands of keeping brand’s visibility high at all times. Tongal consults and wants to make sure a brand gets the visibility they wish and lets the community run wild with it. During each phase, brands get to learn more about the fans and what ideas they have and view the current challenges and opportunities the brands are facing with right now.
50,000 creative minds combined into a Tongal community allows brands to have a greater pool of interesting and new ideas. Whereas with an agency, can’t develop the same number of unique ideas Tongal can provide.
James De Julio says, “The statistics on videos more likely generating more clicks or likely to be shared is pretty staggering. It’s a really big opportunity to deliver high quality video from a creative workforce and knowing of course where technology was going, where next year you’re going to have a 4K camera in your pocket. Knowing that, tools are accessible to everyone. Just figuring how work was accessible was really what we looked at.”
Opportunities on both sides benefit from Tongal’s idea. Brands can gather ideas and view their fans at work, while the community gets to experience working with a top brand and creating ideas and videos. It just needs one person to create a good idea, but 50,000 can make it into a great one.
