Cast your mind back a few years and it’s difficult to imagine brands letting mere members of the public create their advertising campaigns. But that’s exactly what’s happening in the digital age. User-generated content (UGC) has exploded onto the advertising scene in the past 12 months with brands ranging from Cadillac to M&M’s launching advertising initiatives that get consumers involved. 

 

Cadillac has allowed consumers the chance to upload their own videos and stories about their Cadillac through Mycadillacstory.com; Chevy has enabled consumers to be part of its adverts by letting them upload photos of themselves and watch an advert with their faces pasted on top; Toyota drove into virtual world Second Life with the Scion brand, allowing Lifers to own and modify its vehicles; and M&M’s let consumers customise its product to look like themselves. 

 

But UGC has not always been a comfortable bedfellow with advertisers. By its very nature it is often brash, uncompromising and rude. Despite these fears, many FMCG brands have followed the lead of the automotive companies into the UGC arena and Pringles, Dove, Herbal Essences and Doritos have all taken the plunge. 

 

Ensuring your UGC campaign hits the right note is an art rather than a science, but there are rules you can follow to ensure it is a creative and commercial success (see box, page 22). Doritos has set the gold standard for UGC advertising with its Crash the Super Bowl UGC video competition this year (case study, page 31) that saw a consumer come up with the creative concept to filled the most expensive TV advertising airtime in the world. 

 

Rudy Wilson, Doritos brand manager at Frito-Lay, says that it is vital when embarking on a UGC initiative not only to listen to the consumers, but to act on what they are saying. “For Doritos, consumer control is about more than just listening to our consumers. Their voice and creativity actually impacts brand decisions. For example, we were so impressed with all five “Crash the Super Bowl” finalists that we decided to air all five of them as a first-ever consumer-created national ad campaign,” he says. 

 

However, offering consumers the opportunity to get involved with advertising is not enough to generate interest in most UGC initiatives. The hard core of consumers that want to interact with the brand need to be gathered up online and collectively brought to the party. 

 

P&G has developed a unique approach to this problem by aiming to pull together the community in one place with compelling non-brand related content first before offering brands the chance to connect with the public. 

 

Capessa, an online community of American women housed through Yahoo!’s health category and created by P&G Productions – the content development arm of P&G – is the vehicle for this. Capessa is a collection of inspirational stories told via both text and video from real women covering every issue from health and well-being to finding love. 

 

Members of the community are encouraged to share their stories alongside stories from other real women that have been filmed, produced and uploaded by P&G Productions. Pat Gentile, head of P&G Productions, says that by partnering with Yahoo! the initiative gained distribution and access to millions of eyeballs immediately, helping Capessa to connect with the target audience. 

 

This, in turn, allowed Capessa to create meaningful UGC competitions tailored to brands and audiences. “One of my jobs is to find a way of engaging directly with online communities. We are approaching this as marketers and trying to learn the different ways users and brands engage. If what we do fits in with brand desires, then we can help them target the audience,” he explains. 

 

Once P&G had gathered the right target audience it introduced brands to the mix. P&G cleaning brand Dawn launched the Come Clean For Mother’s Day UGC video competition on Capessa, with entrants asked to upload videos of them divulging longkept secrets. The contest was also hosted as a group on YouTube and the winner was offered free maid service for a year as a prize. 

 

Targeted incentives such as prizes are an important factor that helps make sure that the right audience turns up and participates. Free maid service is perfect for a hard-working mother. Doritos offered $10,000 for the creator of its advert, although the real prize was getting the idea aired during the Superbowl broadcast. 

 

In China, Motorola tapped into the UGC craze with pop star Jay Chou to promote its new ROCKR E6 music handset by offering exclusive content. Motorola launched the phone in an exclusive deal with Jay Chou that meant fans could only download Chou’s new album from the Motomusic site. This brought the fans to the branded environment where Motorola then allowed them to remix exclusive Chou songs to email to friends or download to own. The site received 200 million hits in 10 days. 

 

Motorola has a track record in the UGC advertising field. It has also made the most of the medium to promote its A372 handset in Asia by using an online character called Thumb Boy to demonstrate the A372’s USP – the ability to draw letters on a keypad using your thumb to write a text message. 

 

Motorola created the Thumb Boy campaign through MindShare Beijing, developing an animated character that users could modify and vote on. The character was also integrated into popular Chinese IM service QQ.com and developed as an e-card that could be created by consumers to wish each other a happy Chinese New Year. 

 

Tapping into the Chinese love of IM services and providing a valuable service through the e-card proved enough of an incentive to generate more than 10 million visits to the Motorola A372 website and see 89 million Thumb Boy e-cards sent. It became a sell-out success for all the 100,000 A372 handsets. 

 

Ian Chapman-Banks, vice-president and general manager, marketing at Motorola Asia Pacific, says the success of Thumb Boy was due to it offering the user something valuable that fitted into their lives. 

 

 “It has to be fun and interesting, relevant to the audience and do something novel, and it helps to build it around an event like we did with Chinese New Year,” he says. Julian Newby, managing partner, Motorola Asia at MindShare Beijing, says that the community nature of the initiative with peer-rating competitions and the e-card mechanic meant that the people who wanted to engage with the Thumb Boy brand could spread the message to others. 

 

“Thumb Boy connected with people as it was fresh. It burst onto the scene as a real water cooler moment. UGC advertising can be massive in the future as long as it offers users something useful or fun,” he says. 

 

However, before advertisers get carried away with their early successes it is wise to point out that there is a long way to go. Some of the best UGC has not been created by advertisers but has been developed by the public in homage to the advertising.  

 

Dove may have picked up prizes galore for its Evolution viral but it also spawned thousands of funnier versions online. There are thousands of spoof Mac versus PC Apple adverts on YouTube and its competitor sites. The content of these consumer-createdads could not have been anticipated and yet all have ended up supporting the brand.

 

David Springle, CTO of YoSpace, the mobile company behind usergenerated content service SeeMeTV, says that if advertisers really want to harness UGC then they must give up far more control. 

 

“UGC is about user democracy and too much UGC advertising seems managed. A lot of advertising UGC is a sanitised version of what UGC is all about. It is hardly Star Wars Kid [a viral showing a young boy pretending to be a Jedi with a light sabre that has been endlessly adapted by digital devotees] is it? No brand has created anything as viral as that or anything that has solicited as much creative input.” 

 

The problem is that the long tail of UGC is full of the off-message creative that brands do not want to be associated with, which means that unless they are willing to risk more, UGC advertising may have limited room to grow.