I’ve spent most of my career working as a producer, breaking ideas down to their core, figuring out what they are, and how they should work.

Over the past year, I’ve read and heard a lot of talk about crowdsourcing, and it’s mostly questions about what it means for the soul and future of our industry. What I haven’t heard a lot about is what it actually means. Blame it on a good buzz word, but everyone seems to be caught up in the effect rather than the what. As a producer it’s hard for me to skip the what.

When you break crowdsourcing down to its essence, it takes on a relatively familiar shape. It’s Web 2.0 + freelance, or more specifically, aggregated, online freelance. The only thing that’s new about this idea are the websites and tools that filter and bring the communities together, though a site like TopCoder has been around since 2001.

Crowdsourcing sites make it easier for small businesses, brands, and agencies, to access and activate freelance communities, at lower cost, and that’s a very cool and powerful thing, but even great tools don’t remove the baggage that comes with having to lead and manage a freelance and virtual workforce.

The best things we’ve done since I’ve been at CP+B, particularly in the digital space, have been a result of co-located and cross-disciplinary teams working together. But even the successes have come with challenges, and it can be hard getting people to work together well even when they sit next to each other in the same building. When you add physical distance, different time zones, tight timelines, and a lack of shared work culture and goals, it gets a whole lot more difficult to do effective, press worthy work. It’s not impossible, but it takes more time, and in the marketing world, that’s not something we have a lot of.

Crowdsourcing has a future. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a smart way to open up the ideation and design process, as well as empower consumers to take a more active role in your marketing efforts. But as good as the Web collaboration tools are today, the toughest creative problems, more often than not, get solved faster and more efficiently by teams sitting and working together.

For that reason, we’ll continue to experiment with and incorporate the latest and greatest collaboration and social media tools into our work, but as far as our business model goes, the premium, for the foreseeable future, will be placed on creating an evolving work environment and process that enables better teamwork. Original A-team style.

That’s how we get results. And that’s what our clients are paying for.