eYeka: Connecting Brands and Creatives

Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Danone, Unilever, P&G, Hyundai and Toyota – just some of the brands who are working with the creative crowdsourcing platform eYeka. Here we chat with Yannig Roth, Marketing Manager at eYeka, about their business and what they bring to the international creative community.

eYeka is different from other freelance communities….

in two main ways. Firstly, eYeka is not about getting design work done at the lowest possible cost. We use crowdsourcing to allow clients to expose their brands to a wealth of creativity and consumer engagement. We work hand in hand with innovation, market research or media agencies to put the consumer back at the center of marketing. We want brands to market with consumers, not just for them, and doing that requires a lot of collaboration with brands and their existing marketing ecosystem.

Secondly, our approach to creative crowdsourcing is unique. From the beginning to the end, eYeka is involved and supports each project: we spend time with the client to discover the best way to tap into our creative community to fulfill their objectives; we translate the client’s marketing objective into a creative challenge that a participant would understand, find fun and want to take part in; and we organize a lot of post-contest work to solve the client’s problems. The eYeka team is involved in every step of a contest. This is what makes us unique.

Our creative community…

is over 340,000 strong, spans across 167 countries and is growing by the thousands every month. eYeka originates in France, so the French and European parts of the community are historically very strong. Eastern European countries are very active too, and we have a high number of participants from Russia and Ukraine. After Europe, the most active members come from South-East Asia, North America and LATAM and interestingly the single most active community member of 2015 is a creative from Morocco. So you see, eYeka is extremely global, which is why we have a multi-lingual team of community managers to provide quality support.

The biggest challenges faced by our creatives…

are obstacles to creativity. The lack of stimuli is important and many people who feel creative never take the plunge because they don’t know how to start creating! At eYeka however, we have found that the more projects are on the platform, the more people participate – which seems counterintuitive. We believe that the eYeka.com contests are helping a lot of people to express themselves. To help them maximize their creative potential, we recently launched a page – called “Creative Techniques” – dedicated to help their ideas to flow freely.

Another reason is the lack of time or money to create. Like everyone, eYeka’s community members juggle with a variety of other activities. As a platform, we can solve this problem in 2 ways: either we design contests that are less demanding in time and money, like the “eYeka Express” contests, or we design contests in stages and help participants with monetary grants to execute their ideas. Today we do both these things and they work very well.

Last but not least, trust is another challenge. Designers come to our site, see the world’s biggest brands hosting prestigious, free contests, and they are not sure whether they should trust our platform. We have a number of ways to show them that eYeka is real and that they can participate without any fear of not being paid. Our recent partnership with Payoneer is a supplementary step in that direction.

All creatives can be inspired by…

The beautiful story of a Californian freelance designer, Holly McAlister. She decided to enter her first creative crowdsourcing contest after losing her San Diego ad agency design job. Her first contest was to design a new skateboard helmet, and even though she didn’t win, she said that it opened her eyes to a whole new career path. Since starting out on eYeka in 2012, she has won 27 crowdsourcing contests, with prizes totaling over $60,000. She’s just one success story in a host of others.

We decided to partner with Payoneer…

to overcome payment challenges that were really time-consuming and expensive, especially when we had to manually do bank transfers, go back & forth many times, or handle special requests. eYeka has paid out almost €6 million to its community members so these challenges could be quite cumbersome for our staff. Now, thanks to Payoneer, we have a much easier and more reliable payment system that will allow our team to focus on other important tasks like supporting the community and providing feedback to their submissions.

The future of this industry…

lies in the collective creative power of crowds. Since we started, the community has submitted almost 100,000 ideas to close to 1000 contests, and we are very proud of that. We have helped our clients unlock major marketing challenges and crack complicated positioning problems – all this thanks to our talented and skilled community. Now, we look into the future with a lot of excitement, and we will work hard to make the next 100,000 connections between creative talents with major brands.

To get started on eYeka…

Whether you are a creative looking for some fun challenges, or a brand that needs some fresh inspiration, all you have to do is go to eYeka.com.