July 31, 2006 Comments
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I've written quite a bit about the amazing increases in consumer generated media over the past year or two...especially in terms of blogs, podcasts and the self-publishing video outlets like YouTube. While corporate American and big name advertising firms seemed to be pretty hesitant about embracing CGM in the past, an article over at the International Herald Tribune implies that that may be about to change. The question then becomes...can companies used to having complete control over their brand message survive in a world where they are the ones responsible for turning that control over to the world?
From the article:
Few ad campaigns are considered complete anymore without a prominent Internet presence, preferably with an interactive element to draw in consumers and get them to "engage" with the brand. Increasingly, this interactivity takes the form of customizing part of a marketing campaign; in some cases, advertisers are going even further and allowing consumers to make the ads themselves.
But that may be about to change, advertising executives say, as marketers wake up to the popularity of user-generated content and social networking and acknowledge that on the Internet, controlling the message is often no longer possible anyway.
"Without having complete chaos, is there a way to have controlled chaos?" said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief executive of Denuo, a unit of Publicis that specializes in new technology.
While some companies, like Mentos, have embraced the publicity that can come from consumer generated media, others have learned a hard lesson about the reality of putting your brand control in the hands of strangers. General Motors suffered an embarrassing incident earlier this year when they invited Internet users to create and upload their own commercials for the Chevy Tahoo. While GM was likely expecting to see some interesting takes on the fun you could have with the popular SUV, they instead found themselves flooded with propaganda films slamming the Tahoe's gas guzzling nature and blaming SUVs for things like global warming.
While it's interesting to see big business beginning to embrace the potential of consumer generated media, it's important to note that there are definite obstacles that will have to be overcome for this to work.
For user-generated content to spread further into mainstream advertising, executives say a few practical issues, like intellectual property rights and compensation, will have to be sorted out. For now, most video-sharing sites require contributors to sign over all rights to the content, though Revver.com, for instance, gives back a percentage of any ad revenue a video earns.
Some ad executives also say user-generated content could turn out to be a trend, like reality television, that wanes once the novelty wears off. On the other hand, the business magazine Fast Company recently warned that the trend could spread so fast that advertising "creatives" would be extinct a decade from now, replaced by amateurs churning out their own ads.
Those are obviously some pretty big hurdles to overcome, especially the issue of property rights and compensation. If consumer generated media becomes a regular part of 'everyday advertising' it will eventually reach the point where simply getting to say "I created that" isn't going to make the creators happy. Especially not if/when the company they created an ad for sees record profits due to the success of the ad.
Overall, it will be interesting to see how the big brands manage to play things out in an arena that small businesses have already started to explore and implement.
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