The internet revolutionized and democratized the businesses of music, communications, publishing, film, and, television. Is advertising next?

That’s what Rob Salvatore, MBA ’03, is counting on. And if the big brands like Barbie, Benjamin Moore, and Allstate lining up to work with him are any indication, he’s on to something.

Salvatore is the co-founder and CEO of Tongal, a website that uses competitions and crowdsourcing to develop video ad campaigns. Imagine YouTube, but with creative briefs, grassroots idea pitches, no shaky cell phone footage, and thousands of dollars of prize money going towards the best productions.

It’s a novel business model for advertising that allows brands and consumers to connect more directly,  and gives novice creatives, including copywriters, animators, and videographers, an opportunity to build a brand-name portfolio.

The website works likes this:

• A brand posts a project asking for content. Companies that have used the site include established brands like Pringles, Ace Hardware, and Motorola Droid, and new businesses such as Freshpet and Popchips.
• Tongal users submit brief ideas based on a company’s stated objectives and target audience.
• The company chooses its favorite ideas and asks the Tongal community to submit video ads based on one of those concepts.
• Each of the top ideas and the winning video gets a cash award and potential distribution on the brand’s website, social media channels or sometimes even television.

The prize money for winning concepts and videos ranges anywhere from $250 to $25,000, depending on how much the brand has allocated and what stage of the competition a user wins.

“What’s really fun about it is you could be a copywriter in Wisconsin and come up with your story and then it wins, and then an improv group in southern California could then take your idea and bring it to life, or an animator in Malaysia would take it and submit it,” Salvatore says, noting that the site pays residuals to members whose ideas are used in the winning video of a particular project.

The real stars of Tongal are the videos, and Salvatore shared some of his favorites:

Tongal has worked with 50 different brands since launching in mid-2009, hosting more than 100 projects and attracting roughly 15,000 registered users.

The Beach Boys recently used the Tongal community to develop the official music video for the rerelease of their “Heroes and Villians” single on their album, Smile (the sunsoaked hippie-inspired animation got the Brian Wilson seal of approval). And a Tongal-produced web video for Duck Tape has attracted more than 400,000 views on YouTube.

As is the case with any new business model, Salvatore is aware that some people may have animosity toward Tongal and its work-for-spec system. Are brands just trying to get free work? Are Tongal content producers undercutting traditional ad agencies?

“It’s a disintermediating process,” acknowledges Salvatore, adding that Tongal sees itself as a tool for creative agencies, not a direct competitor. He says most of the Tongal users are freelancers or people with other day jobs trying to catch a break, find a creative outlet or respond to a brand they have a personal connection with.

“There’s also an enormous need for content now,” he says. “Traditional agencies and other production alternatives can’t possibly meet the demand. This is about tapping into that broader creativity but also tapping into a bigger group of people who can fulfill the work. You can’t just have one TV ad and one print ad, and blast that out. You need to reach people across different channels. That’s why the brands are doing it.”

Salvatore started Tongal with two friends from his undergraduate years at Boston College. The trio worked on Wall Street before getting plugged into talent management and production in Hollywood. They formed an investment vehicle to fund entertainment content they wanted to see and give up-and-coming artists an opportunity to break out. They met the founder of community software development website TopCoder, who suggested they use crowdsourcing to create new content. While crowdsourcing something on the scale of a movie seemed perilous, 15-60 second commercials sounded like a perfect fit.

So Tongal was born. The name is an anagram for the last name of Sir Francis Galton, a 19th-century scientist who tested an early “wisdom of the crowds” theory by challenging a group of people to guess the weight of an ox. While no one guessed correctly, the average of the crowd’s answers turned out to be very close to the real weight. Hence Tongal’s red ox logo—itself the product of crowdsourcing.

As a company forging a new business model, much of their sales effort focuses on educating clients about the fact that a service like Tongal even exists. They allow room for failure—try and revise, try and revise, is their mantra. The company is staying lean—just six employees currently. The first creative person they hired was a Tongal participant.

And for Salvatore, it remains about the power of the community.

"Very early on, we did a campaign for [microlending website] Kiva, and a guy from northern Sweden won. He had never even heard of Kiva and didn’t know what microlending was. A dude who lives 20 miles from the Arctic Circle somehow found our website, liked it, had never thought of this organization before in his life, got a Canadian guy to do the voiceover, got a guy in Stockholm to do animation, he directed it. [Kiva] loved it. They’ve dubbed it in multiple languages, and it wound up on the homepage of YouTube. That was an early moment where we realized this is going to work.”