An ad for Dr Pepper’s “Win Time of Your Life” contest (image: www.goantiques.com)

Co-creation, the eYeka way, already existed in the 1950′s! That’s what I found out recently, reading Julia Kirby’s Creative That Cracks the Code article in the Harvard Business Review. “It’s easy to forget how long companies have been inviting ideas from ‘the crowd,” Julia Kirby explains, “if you’re in doubt, read The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a memoir of 1950′s America in which the author’s mother writes advertising jingles for contest after contest.”

It seems that Jeff Howe didn’t actually coin the term, but popularized it in his Wired article and book. As I didn’t know about these advertising contests, I thought it would be interesting to learn more about them, so I read The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. I found out that during the so-called “Contest Era” in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of brands organized contests to advertise and sell their products. The book is a rare testimonial about this form of advertising, that we know today as creative crowdsourcing. Here are 7 facts about advertising contests and consumer creativity… half-a-century ago.

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