Fiverr Challenges Ad Agencies With Creative Team Builder Tool

Fiverr is rolling out a new platform to match teams of creatives with brands in its ongoing quest to expand into upscale job markets for corporations and higher-end professionals. The new tool, Togetherr, will make use of the freelance platform's Creative Genome machine learning software to assemble combinations of freelancers catered to the specific needs of a client's project. The Israeli company is pitching the AI platform as an alternative to an agency model it says can no longer serve the creativity demands of today's fast-paced marketing environment. "Long before the pandemic, our industry was stuck in a rut, slowly choking the creative energy and ambition that once defined our industry," said Togetherr general manager Amir Guy. "The business people, finance people, procurement people took the helm. They're basically leading the industry; creative people, for the most part, were put in the back." The machine learning model takes into account awards creatives have won, past campaigns they've led or staffed, and agencies and brands they've worked with to match a given client's needs. According to Fiverr, creatives on the Togetherr platform will be vetted to include a premium tier of industry talent. Togetherr allows brands to cater teams according to a number of selectors.. For brands, Fiverr is billing the platform as a way to streamline the creative hiring process by doing away with much of the business-side negotiations and commitments built into the established industry. "People ask me, 'Are you disrupting the market?' And I'm saying 'No, the market is already being disrupted,'" Guy said. "If creatives leave the agencies, if agencies can't make the revenues they used to make, if clients are looking for direct access and are building in-house capabilities, then the market is disrupted. What we are doing is building a platform that aims to enable and accelerate these new ways of working." Fiverr's expansion into high-end creativity The rollout comes on the heels of Fiverr's acquisitions of learning platform CreativeLive and creative networking site Working Not Working in 2021. The deals were part of a larger strategy by Fiverr to expand its reach from largely independent gigs for small- to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs to managing bigger professional contracts for corporate work. The creation of the project has been guided by an advisory board composed of high-profile creatives, including Greg Hahn, Per Pedersen, Eva Santos Bouzos, Mark Tutssel and Karin Onsager-Birch. "There’s no right or wrong way to unlock creativity. However, by putting talent and ideas over profits, you remove the pressure and make way for beautiful, bold and diverse ideas," Hahn said in a statement. "This is what Togetherr is all about—using technology to unlock people’s creativity and putting talent first." Fiverr's move into higher-end creative talent in particular has drawn backlash from some in the industry, who worry the company is imposing gig economy working conditions on upmarket creative fields. Guy counters that because Togetherr will operate as a vetted closed platform with freelancers able to set their own daily rates, they will be able to command higher prices than they might otherwise in the open market. "We're saying creatives need to be paid more," Guy said. "We're not for everyone. As opposed to Fiverr, in which everyone can open a gig and then you can compete on your talent and prices. Here you have to be of a certain level... and you're only competing with people from your level and up." The Togetherr platform is focused specifically on high-level creative thinking and so-called "big idea" marketing, something Guy said is falling by the wayside in an industry increasingly infatuated with numbers-driven advertising. But Guy said the company may also roll out a separate solution for performance marketing at some point down the line. How Passion for Data Led to a Top Streaming Gig at Paramount