As TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, an interesting new company has moved into beta launch mode – Poptent, a “crowdsourcing platform” for the creation of advertisements. Why I put crowdsourcing in quotes is that they are not targeting a totally open platform where anyone can participate (think: YouTube), but rather a community of “small put professional teams capable of producing TV quality ads.” In the words of Poptent (you can check our a video about them here):

Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.

Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.

Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.

What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms – too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here – as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.

Poptent has at least three elements that help deal with this. they are targeting the creation of a community of top-notch videographers with great skills, not the public at large. In order to participate on the site companies need to pony up $25 K in cash – which should be enough to limit “speculative requests”. Advertisers than pay something in the $5K – $7.5 K range to purchase ads they like. They are also upfront in noting (see Mark Schoneveld’s comment on October 8th at 11:19) that the contest model is not sustainable – they’ll have to evolve it over time, but you have to walk before you run.

Of course, there are challenges with any models like this, and a lot of people disagree with crowdsourcing models entirely. The comments and links after the TechCrunch post are particularly interesting on this front. Of note:

Mark (from Poptent – he has many interesting replies in the comments): As for engagement, yes, they are. However, we aren’t simply going for mass engagement as one might, say, running a CGA contest on YouTube. Rather, we’re looking to tap into a ‘prosumer’ market where folks are actually looking for ways to make money with their video skills, and for brands who want great quality videos.

Evo: Why would anyone produce a commercial on spec. Spec jobs kill the design/creative industry. It takes time to produce a broadcast quality commercial and if you don’t get chosen then you just wasted your time. There is a reason it costs $100K to $500K to make a commercial. Video and Sound editing, actors, lighting, music tracks, this list goes on and on. Also, Time spent in school learning how to do it the right way. (there are a lot of comments on this theme – many people are against spec work).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out – what do wikinomics readers think about it?