Abstract:
As advances in digital technologies pave the way for new forms of production and consumption, many incumbent firms are developing new offerings to remain relevant, sometimes by integrating the crowd into their production process. This 24-month ethnographic study describes how an incumbent firm in the advertising industry (“AdCo”) developed a new firm-crowd produced offering called participatory ads—whereby team members inside the firm used social media platforms to invite the crowd to create content, and this content came to constitute the ad. I show how integrating the crowd into the production process changed work for professionals inside AdCo, primarily by decreasing their control over their work process and product. Using within-site variation in six participatory advertising project teams’ success, I highlight the importance of “guided mobilization” practices to successful project outcomes. These practices facilitated internal teams’ ability to simultaneously mobilize and guide the crowd and social media platforms. I also show how team structure inside a firm is an important enabling condition for the use of guided mobilization practices. I use these findings to add to our understanding of firms, crowds and coproduction in the digital age and of work, organizations and social media.