Next Monday night (August 23 2010) marks the release of Unilever’s first ever Crowdsourced advert on British television, which will be broadcast during the commercial breaks of Coronation Street (ITV) and Big Brother (Channel Four).

It’s a low risk strategy which the marketing giants hope will bear fruit- especially as the ad cost just 30-40 percent of the fee they could have expected to pay a traditional agency to produce it.

Unilever have already shown their commitment to Crowdsourcing after announcing their ‘Consumer Creative Challenge’ in April this year. Unilever hopes the campaign will eventually lead to Crowdsourced video content for 13 of its brands: Lynx, Ben & Jerry’s, Close Up, Dove’s deodorant, Wall’s ice cream, Knorr, Lifebuoy, Comfort, Sure, Surf, Sunsilk and Vaseline.

Unilever’s Crowdsourced ad contest for ‘Peperami Nibblers’ saw almost 1,200 entries submitted for a $10,000 prize. The winning entry- using the slogan ‘It’s little bits of an animal’ (based on Peperami’s existing slogan ‘It’s a bit of an animal’) – was devised and written by Rowland Davies, an ex-creative director from Munich, and submitted as a joint project with Kevin Baldwin, a London copywriter.

Of course, the forthcoming Crowdsourced campaign owes a lot to the well-established Peperami figurehead, ‘Animal’, since his creation by ad agency Lowe in 1993. With the character so easily identifiable, the theme of the ad was obvious- it just required fresh impetus for a new storyline.

The advert- titled ‘Living With The Little Ones (which you can view here)’- is a short story about Animal and his family of mini ‘nibbler’ offspring. Like Animal, the nibblers cause chaos around the household. Following a telling off from Animal, the nibblers retaliate by eating their father.

Matt Burgess, the organiser of some of Unilever’s smaller portfolio groups (including Pot Noodle, Marmite and Slimfast) believes other advertising agencies should be more open minded towards Crowdsourcing.

“I don’t understand it as it is not going to be fatal to their model. However not all briefs are suited to Crowdsourcing,” he said.

“If you look at Pot Noodle and Marmite- they are quite tough briefs to crack. Certain complex communications are not suitable to Crowdsourcing, it will be a long time until they are, and the agency model represents the best way to cracking that brief.”

But Burgess revealed that Lowe lost their 15-year Peperami contract last summer, due, in part, to the costs of the older traditional agency model.

He said: “Peperami is a small brand in Unilever terms, which means that the fee-based structure of big agencies are quite a high percentage of what we put out there in marketing spend.”

Burgess’ views echo those of Maurice Levy, the Chief Executive of Publicis, who back in 2008, said: “Agencies are struggling to evolve, as marketing and traditional media go digital in all areas of campaign execution and audience activation.

“There is a power shift from master agency control of accounts to a more digitally empowered client wielding new partner and provider connections.”

And it’s a model that is being used increasingly by Procter & Gamble. Crowdsourcing methods are used in nearly 50% of P&G’s products, in areas such as packaging, design, marketing models and research methods. They have maintained a workforce of around 7,000 people, but Crowdsourcing also allows access to a far greater number of people in the team.

Unilever are no mugs- after all, they are in Forbes Magazine’s Top 100 list of the ‘World’s Most Reputable Companies.’ They aren’t claiming Crowdsourcing to be the model for their entire portfolio list – far from it - but they do recognise a change in current in the advertising agency waters.

Burgess adds: “Today’s consumers are looking for new levels of brand engagement and this experiment shows that for the right brand, Crowdsourcing can be an excellent vehicle for creative consumer interaction.”