So you might have heard that agency DW+H ‏are crowdsourcing for a new name, over at Victors&Spoils project #112. There's a bounty of $4K to the winner of the name-game, and PSFK have interviewed the founders about this stunt (see below). DW+H explain in this post why they feel they need a name-change, and why they chose this approach.

One of our agency pillars is a belief in collaboration with other like-missioned companies. So today we launched a renaming project with the crowd-sourcing agency Victors & Spoils. It's an industry first for an agency to enlist another agency to help name them, and we're excited about that.

I don't know. Crowdsourcing a name isn't really an industry first. Wary of "firsts" anything, I'm not sure it's the first time an agency hired another to create their name when there are name agencies out there who do nothing but create names either. Back in 2005 we named a Danish agency right here on adland in a wee contest where winners would get ipods and account upgrades. Nobody called it crowdsourcing back then, we just called it a game. It worked as intended as it got the agency a bit of press in Dagens Media (Sweden), Propaganda (Norway), a large article in Børsen (Denmark) and a notice as far away as Brazil in Clube de Criação de São Paulo.

Whatever new name that DW+H ends up with... I just hope it's not Synarchy (which quickly named itself Enfactico instead, after learning that Synarchy means "shadow government".)

Which is probably the very reason dw+h is doing this via crowdsourcing. The press. They're getting lots of it now. I wonder if they'll get slightly annoyed when they find that DW+H now shows up all over the trades, branded as an agency that can't even come up with their own name.