ntroduction  

Americans love the underdog. We root for the Peter Parkers, the Luke Skywalkers, and the Harry Potters of our day. We give standing ovations to the whistleblowers of corrupted companies and cheer for small businesses who withstand corporate-chain pressure. We absolutely adore the nobody who becomes a somebody. American Idol’s overnight celebrities, Kelly Clarkson or Clay Aiken, and ABC’s Bachelorette, Jen Schefft, come to mind.

Perhaps this obsession with David’s heroic story of how he slew Goliath has galvanized the popularity of what has been termed of recent past as “User Generated Content” (also known as UGC). The thought of the average consumer influencing positive change from an apathetic corporation (e.g. “iPod’s Dirty Secret” video by the Neistet Brothers) seems to have inspired the general population to action. (Not to mention companies as well.) After the explosive successes of Blogger and YouTube, Time’s bestowal of the coveted title of “2006 Person of the Year” to YOU (i.e. the consumer) is undoubtedly warranted.

But who was the voice who initiated the uproar over User Generated Content? What events pitched Consumer Generated Media into Consumer Generated Mania? Is this explosion of the university-freshman-copywriter or the bored-employee-commercial-producer increasing in magnitude or slowly disintegrating before our very eyes? Should advertisers begin seeking advice from the hobo population for cardboard sign taglines instead of vying for million dollar client accounts? The following discussion will address these questions in an effort to project the future of User Generated Content within the advertising industry, and more specifically, Consumer Generated Ads (CGAs).

You Meant What?

The disagreement revolving around the definitions of User Generated Content undoubtedly adds to the struggle for advertisers to know what to do about it. Nathaniel Emmons, a student of theology who studied under Jonathan Edwards, once observed that “Just definitions either prevent or put an end to a dispute.” In regard to the dispute of the Consumer-Generated Age and what that means for advertisers, agreeing upon the definitions that are “just” is... well, really tricky. Only two indisputable constructs can be verified regarding the definitions of the Consumer-Generated Age:

1. Consumers are involved.
2. They are generating....stuff.

This “stuff” can include online forums, message boards, instant messenger, personal websites, blog entries, review and rating sites, online groups and communities, and podcasts. Let’s not forget videos online via YouTube, mp3s, blogs, and whatever it is that would categorize Facebook and MySpace.

But very recently, Superbowl XLI pretty much confirmed the arrival of the Consumer Advertiser with an unusual slew of aired television commercials that were created by “real people”. This specific uprising form of User Generated Content has recently framed much of the advertising industry’s dialogues and has broadened the scope of the UGC concept. In the past, the term “Consumer-generated media” primarily described word-of-mouth product opinions that could be found on the Internet(“Consumer-generated,” 2006). However, a current Wikipedia discussion to merge this term with “User-Generated Content” possibly speaks to the current state of this phenomenon ("User-generated," 2007) which will later be addressed. To culminate all aspects of the consumer’s voice, the definition of “User Generated Content” (for the purposes of this paper) will represent the “stuff” (as mentioned before) that has been created by a consumer, online or off. A “Consumer Generated Ad” is a construction of a consumer that was specifically created to be an ad. Figure 1.1 illustrates the relationship of these terms.

Figure 1.1: Overview of User Generated Content

History of User Generated Content

As a result of UGC popularity, consumers have caught the attention of advertisers and for many, thrown off guard. Even though the advertising industry has continually acknowledged audience fragmentation to be a “grueling reality for the last several years” (Petrecca, 2006), the audience itself seems not to have been fragmented but have been united with a resonating voice that has pierced through the advertising cacophony. That is, UGC has forced the industry to listen to and allow the consumer to not only speak but to loudly speak back. But, where did this voice come from?

In 1999, a few average people were given a video camera and told to shoot a movie in a wooded forest, which they eventually called The Blair Witch Project. This was one of the first instances that everyday people had a chance to produce a movie, and therefore, one of the first whiffs that the public had of UGC. Out of this experiment, the popular movie, The Blair Witch Project was born. As seen from Figure 2.1, other mediums of UGC emerged over the following years: Blogger.com, Napster, and the Subservient Chicken, to name a few (Bruner, 2005).

Figure 2.1: History of Online Advertising

Source: Bruner, R. E. (2005, April). The decade in online advertising. Doubleclick

Not to mention, the onset of Reality TV probably also added to the excitement of UGC with shows such as Survivor, American Idol, and Trading Spaces. Media fragmentation has increased due to the cult-like following of Reality-TV channels such as TLC and MTV. Although UGC first seemed to emerge in the late 1990’s, the first whispers of the “Consumer Generated Media” concept were overheard during the early weeks of the 21st century from digital media agents called ShareYourWorld, Inc and MouthShut.com who were in the business of connecting consumers with licensers (“Consumer-generated media,” 2006). Soon after, a series of events took place that eventually led the evolution of CGM toward UGC. Table 1.1 shows a brief timeline of the events that took place after the dot-come crash.

Table 1.1 shows that the first forms of UGC (like Web TV) appeared around 1996. Also around this time, Internet access was spreading at a rapid rate (“Network,” 2007). Since then, User Generated Content has always been fully intertwined with the World Wide Web, but only within in the recent past (i.e. the past seven years) has UGC become the central topic of dinner conversation. But why now? What events stirred the take-off of UGC?

One thought is that the popularity of UGC may have been stimulated by the dot-com fallout of 2000. After all, our mothers were perceptive when they observed that “misery loves company.” Perhaps consumers found an outlet through UGC to share their sorrows with other victims in the virtual world, but more likely, the wildfire of UGC was just the next reasonable step in the progression of the Internet.

Around 1996, after the inception of the World Wide Web, 20,000 websites had already been created, where about 14% were found to be related to business activities and services (Cockburn & Wilson, 1996). These web pages were already interactive, engaging the consumer in online transactions despite the uneasiness consumers experienced regarding Internet security. Consumer feedback was also readily available through the provision of an email address on company websites. Markedly, the idea of a dialogue between people via the Internet existed from the beginning. In fact, the primal form of the Internet (known as the ARPANET) was created to connect people within government (“Network,” 2007). But only after Internet restrictions were lifted, businesses began connecting consumers with information. This connection led to requests for consumer feedback, and in turn, created the avenue for business-consumer two-way conversations. User Generated Content emerged in the form of Frequently Asked Questions and Customer endorsement quotes found on company homepages. The bottom line is that the popularity of UGC should not be an unexpected isolated phenomenon, but rather, the rational subsequent step of the Internet’s development. Incidentally, the established history of UGC suggests the improbability of UGC being a fad, and if anything, supports the argument for future robustness.

History of the World Wide Web

If the World Wide Web coexisted at pretty much the same time as User Generated Content, perhaps what is known about the history of the Web will help in creating a model for the advertising industry to deal with UGC.

The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee to create a common information space in which society would communicate by sharing information (Berners-Lee, 1998). As noted by Berners-Lee on his personal homepage, the “first part of the dream is largely realized” with the “dramatic flood of rich material of all kinds onto the Web in the 1990s.”

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the WWW

Source: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

In 1994, the White House launched its first website and email mass marketing campaigns (“Network,” 2007) which undoubtedly gave credence to the reliability of the Web, which in turn, may have instigated the increase of Internet usage that followed. In addition, the Internet changed into the hands of the private sector (“Network,” 2007) which allowed for competitive rates and easier access for the average user. Even in 1996, “no communication medium of electronic technology […] ha[d] ever grown as quickly” as the Internet (Berthon, Pitt, & Watson, 1996) which still holds true today in 2007. With more than 100 million websites online in the year 2006 (“Network,” 2007), the World Wide Web has obviously become a huge playground for advertisers.

Comparison of the World Wide Web and User Generated Content

As concluded from the previous discussion, User Generated Content has been present even from the early stages of the World Wide Web. Evidently, UGC seems to have evolved in a similar fashion to the World Wide Web. Both entities grew from a need to share information. Both gained popularity with private citizens after a government endorsement. Both have been supported by a single company that has acted as a springboard for propagation. For instance, the buzz over UGC seemed to have only skyrocketed after the introduction of YouTube, while the over excitement and ambition for the Web (implied from the tragic dot-com burst of 2000) launched most likely from the 1998 inception of Google. In fact, this specific parallel evokes an interesting question about the future of UGC. Will UGC experience the same tragedy of the infamous dot-com companies that crashed during the turn of the century? And also interesting to ask, now that YouTube has been bought by Google, will the excitement over User Generated Content go out of control? The merging of two powerful intiator platforms may cause even a greater stir than the hype that was felt around startup online companies at the turn of the century.

The Future of Google + YouTube?

Despite the burst of the dot-com bubble, the number of websites grew about 500% from 2005 to 2006 (“Network,” 2007), showing that the Internet has not only survived but grown (which is an understatement at the least). If UGC has paralleled the Web’s development in the past, one could only imply that UGC will bolster its strength as well. In fact, a study conducted at the USC-Annenberg School seems to agree.

On the other hand, like online businesses were and are only a sector of the entire Web, Consumer Generated Ads are also only a part of UGC. If Consumer Generated Ads follow the same trends that online businesses experienced, the peak of maximum success from these types of ads may not be very far into the future. With this in mind, how has the life of online business evolved? Could the dot-com business story indicate the future of Consumer Generated Ads?

The Developmenet of Online Businesses

In 1996, a study by Cockburn and Wilson found that businesses utilized the Web for mostly general publicity and for advertising specific products. Evidently, the advertising industry and the Internet have been intertwined from the very beginning. In fact, the proliferation of the Internet’s popularity could be implicitly and partly attributed to the need of businesses to advertise. Furthermore, Cockburn and Wilson (in 1996) noted that about 12% of their surveyed companies conducted some sort of “online selling of goods or services with the transmission of credit cards” and also mentioned that the use of multi-media capabilities were largely unexploited. In addition, some “future developments” they touched upon were regarding security issues and the potential for more user interaction.

Today, Internet security is still a prominent issue. Nevertheless, business transactions have seemingly gained consumer trust, apparent from the healthy financial statement of online companies such as Amazon.com and Ebay. An increasing number of companies, such as Sony and Chevy to name a few, welcome customers to their websites with Flash introductions or short videos. Interestingly, most of today’s online business websites lack the use of sound to greet the consumer, even though the sound component is relatively easy to include. This suggests that sounds or music on a business website are either too distracting to the consumer or regularly ignored due to muted volumes or incompatible music players. These examples coupled with the present use of company viral videos shared over YouTube, such as “Evolution” representing Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, all signify the present-day heightened significance of multi-media usage on the Web. As a result, online businesses’ increasing use of multi-media paves the way for CGAs to flourish. However, the future of CGAs is still questionable and businesses will have to take great care in investing into this medium. The next section will address this issue.

he Effects and Fate of Consumer Generated Ads

Although consumers have been creating lots of noise about the brands they love or hate in the past, only now has the Consumer Generated Ad forged to the front of the advertising industry’s discussion. Perhaps the fear that has been mentioned before of advertisers losing their jobs to college freshmen was materialized after real ads were shown during the latest Superbowl. But will the motivational drive of consumers last long enough to put advertisers out of a job? Ben Wiener, CEO of Wongdoody, a full service Seattle and L.A. based advertising and interactive agency, believes that “The success of user-generated campaigns is partly due to their content, […] but also partly to their novelty. And that's wearing off” (Moskowitz, 2006). So is the hype around CGAs really dying out? Perhaps a look back at the history of online businesses will help foreshadow the fate of Consumer Generated Ads.

Comparison of Online Businesses to Consumer Generated Ads

An interesting question is this: if the Ebays and Amazons of the Web could be so successful today, what caused the dot-com bubble to burst in 2000? In other words, how can the Internet still be operating at full force today despite the sorrow the dot-com crashed caused? The general consensus regarding the dot-com burst points toward the over-excited investors who placed too much faith in start-up online companies. During that time, money was invested in any type of online company such as ClickMango.com which was created because “older women love mangos” or in businesses such as Boo.com, an e-clothing store that suffered losses due to the lack of online accessibility and functionality from the server provider (Alden, 2005). One journalist eloquently described the dot-com era, saying that “Millions of investors, gripped by a mass speculative fever, had driven dot.com equity valuations to ridiculous heights of fancy” (Farrell, 2000). Nonetheless, the Internet is still alive today and an integral part of business success because users still believe in the concept of interactive efficiency. That is, they believe that the Internet works.

Click on the logo to read the E-bituary

From the introduction of Internet dial-up access to the average citizen in 1994 by CompuServe and America Online (“Network” 2007), six years passed before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. If Consumer Generated Ads (CGAs) follow the same trend, perhaps the proliferation of this so-called fad will reach its peak around the year 2012. On the other hand, investors are not necessarily financially backing up CGAs as they did for online companies and therefore, an economic crash due to CGAs is highly unlikely.

Similarities between the Dot-Com Business and Consumer Generated Ads

Although the different time periods of the dot-com businesses and Consumer Generated Ads already create significant differences between them, some uncanny similarities still remain. First, the investors of both entities fed off the excitement of the general climate that exists after the introduction of a novel idea. The “exuberance of the times” (Alden, 2005) has been continually used to describe the dot-com era, which could be used to describe the advertising industry’s obsession with CGA as well. Leading advertising and non-advertising publications have frequently printed articles revolving around CGAs: AdAge, AdWeek, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Within a period of about a year, calls for consumer generated commercials have been popping up like the plastic creatures in that Whack-A-Mole arcade game.

On the consumer side, the hype has also been stimulated through contests with promises of high-dollar prizes and instant fame. That being said, a second interesting parallel can be made between the products of both entities. A significant factor of the “dot-bomb” was caused by the inability of the company to produce what it had promised. This failure, in turn, was mainly due to the inexperience that comes with being a start-up. In the same way, the inexperience of college freshmen to create professional, poignant ads may still be an ambitious dream of advertising agencies. Too quick of a jump onto the CGA train will most likely produce the similar consequences of ClickMango.com. It is worthy to speculate that the tragic ending of the 2000 dot-com companies could be a foreshadowing of the future of Consumer Generated Advertising.

Yet, the success that companies have had with CGAs cannot be ignored. Why do these ads work? In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, what is so “sticky” about Consumer Generated Ads? This question will be addressed in the next section.

The Stickiness Factor of Consumer Generated Ads

Consumer Generated Ads are new, interactive, and intuitive. Practically anyone can work a camera (as seen from TLC’s My Life as a Child, where kids are given video cameras to document their lives), and uploading a video to YouTube takes not much more effort. But even though the chances of the common man attaining overnight fame and fortune through his CGA are comparable to winning the lottery, thousands of aspiring copywriters, art directors, and producers will still pay the ante of time, intelligence, creativity, and monetary costs for the possibility of going home with the jackpot. For example, Goodby and Silverstein managed to acquire 1065 entries thatillustrated the “passion Doritos eaters feel about the flavors” (“Doritos,” 2007) while Kathy O’Brien, marketing director of the Dove brand, was surprised to receive 1200 entries for their “Real Ads by Real Women” CGA call (Elliot, 2007). But from a consumer’s perspective, how do people justify the time and effort placed into a CGA that has the payback of all-or-nothing?

Consumer Perspective

The I-Love-My-Mac Song

A few reasons come to mind that drive the consumer to create a CGA. Obviously, the monetary and publicity rewards are tangible motivators that probably drive a majority of consumers. However, the time, effort, and costs of creating a worthy entry are obvious barriers that keep the number of entries into a CGA contest down to the thousands instead of millions (as in the Texas Lotto). So what is that extra motivational construct that moves the consumer to action? One possibility could be the strong feelings of loyalty toward the brand. Mike May, an interactive media analyst with The Acorn Group, once told a story about a woman who wrote a song about a Mac which “took off like wildfire” (Moskowitz, 2006). Loyal consumers don’t care if they win or lose; it’s all about how they express their adoration for a brand. Another reason for this unusual motivation could be the real possibility of actually attaining the jackpot. After all, the Dove Body Oil commercial winner was a young girl from Sherman Oaks, California (Dove, 2007) and 22-year-old Dale Backus of an infant company called Five Point Productions received instant fame from his Doritos commercial called “Live the Flavor” (Viatra, 2007). And don’t forget Katie Crabb, a 19-year old college freshman from the University of Wisconsin, who saw her $2.6 million Chevy ad air during the Superbowl XLI (Green, 2007). The fact that these kids were not trained professionals (or even studying the field of advertising), and yet, could trump the professional creatives of big-named advertising agencies, possibly appeals to the American obsession of rooting for the underdog. Especially in an industry where “advertising practitioners rank among used-car salesmen and politicians right at the bottom of the list” (Sullivan, 1998), consumers probably feel a sense of satisfaction through generating their own ads for avenging the years of advertiser deception. On the other hand, consumers are not the only ones who are enthralled by the advent of the CGA.

Company Perspective

Numerous companies and advertising agencies have jumped on the CGA contest bandwagon because a multitude of benefits have emerged from this new advertising medium. First, Consumer Generated Ads are inexpensive compared to agency generated ads. For instance, Converse paid $10,000 for ads aired on TV and $1000 for ads selected for the Web (Petrecca, 2006); however, the average cost to produce a professional commercial has been reported to hit around $380,000 (Wonko-ga, 2006). The drastic price difference should lift the eyebrows of any CMO for at the least minimal consideration. “Duh” is the candid response to the CGA trend from Robert Moskowitz, a journalist for an online trade publisher called iMedia Communications.

     “On one hand, you have six- and seven-figure creative fees for advertisements that      are attracting less and less interest, and arguably having smaller and smaller      impacts on sales; on the other hand, you have a source of basically free advertising      with built-in audiences and tremendous potential for ancillary PR. Which one      should advertisers prefer?” (Moskowitz, 2006)

Though this statement holds quite a bit of truth today, today’s news will not always be new tomorrow. What will happen when the PR buzz turns to a PR bust? The novelty of CGAs have already brought many company names to the forefront: Doritos, GM, and the NFL come mostly to mind as they were aired during Superbowl XLI. These companies actually started a buzz even before Game Day since the idea that an average consumer could step foot into the courts of the advertising industry’s Mecca was downright shocking.

ncidentally, if the success of these CGAs is measured on the basis of online web traffic, companies may wish to rethink their advertising strategy. Table 2.1 shows the changes of web traffic before and after Game Day for each of the companies who had an ad in the Superbowl.

Table 2.1: Super Bowl Advetiser Websites

Source: Prescott, L. (2007, February 8). Super Bowl Advertising - A Way to Increase Web Traffic? In HitWise. Retrieved March 7, 2007.

Interestingly, Snickers, Budweiser, and Budlight were the companies who saw the greatest increase in traffic and none of these companies employed CGAs to sell their products. Contrarily, the companies who did show CGAs either increased traffic minimally or in fact, decreased their traffic. This perhaps is an indication of the volatility of the CGA and conversely, the solidity of the professional creative.

But primarily, the most significant benefit of CGAs is not necessarily their humor, inspiration, or ability to generate buzz. At the end of the day, consumers trust other consumers. Mike May described this relationship with the observation that “there’s something to be said about an ad created by someone who really loves the product, versus what you get from someone who is paid” (Moskowitz, 2006). Apparently, many web surfers agree. Sue MacDonald, senior analyst with Nielsen BuzzMetrics, spoke of a survey “indicating that 77 percent of online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings” (McCarron, 2007). No wonder many companies are turning to forum monitoring and employing writers to give positive opinions for their products. For instance, Bazaar Voice is one online company who has discovered that money can be made from the power of a good a review. As indicated on their website, “BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews” and a study done by the Marketing Experiments Journal® stated that “Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating” (Bazaar, 2007). With this in mind, Bazaar Voice helps companies “stay in control and protect [their] brand” by offering the “first syndication service to publish […] ratings and reviews […] on a growing, open network of the largest shopping sites, such as MSN, PriceRunner, Smarter.com, Froogle and others” (Bazaar website, 2007).

Truly, user generated anything- product reviews, ads, forums, media- create a circle of trust around the brand. As long as a company is confident that they won’t get “Tahoed” (Von Hoffman, 2006), why sabotage the efforts of loyal followers? This element of CGAs, that is, the consumer generated Word of Mouth, is the stickiest factor of them all.

According to the Bigresearch’s Simultaneous Media Usage Study (SIMM) that was posted on the Word of Mouth Marketing Association website, word of mouth “trumps TV, print, and the web” and is the “most talked about options for marketers” today (Rist, 2007). As seen from Table 3.1 compiled by Rist, just for the car and electronics industries, word of mouth far exceeds any other kind of influence. Because CGAs embellish the Word of Mouth marketing technique, the CGA itself may not be as short-lived as previously mentioned.

he Current State of Online Advertising

CGAs are unquestionably a hot ticket item in the advertising industry today, and through the avenue of YouTube and MySpace, these commercials can be disseminated to an impressive number of people all over the world. After performing a raw search, 117,000 videos were found to have been uploaded with the tag “commercial” on YouTube alone. Clearly, when the power of Word of Mouth in the form of Consumer Generated Advertising is mixed with the influence of the internet, a new concoction of potent advertising is brewed. Bill Stephenson, vice president and practice lead, automotive for Nielsen BuzzMetrics noted, “With word of mouth, normally a person who got burned will tell 17 people. Someone with a good experience will tell 11 people. Online you can tell 1,700 people or tell 17,000 people” (McCarron, 2007). As seen from Figure 3.1, Word of Mouth is already a primary technique many companies employ, and the potential for CGA to grow through it has already been addressed. However, how does the overall current state of online advertising project the future of CGAs?

Figure 3.1: Use of Word of Mouth Strategy

The online advertising industry currently offers many options to companies interested in reaching the millions of people who surf the Net every day. Banners, sidebars, pop-ups, floating ads, Unicast ads, pop-unders, streaming sidebars, and pull-down banner ads are a few of the “traditional” choices available (Brain). These ads are mostly beneficial because they are measurable and speculatively effective in generating web traffic (implied from the inability to find an ad-free site on the Net); however, the main source of advertising online in the present day is found implicitly from the overall, encompassing beast of all types of User Generated Content. Evidenced by the addition of online-related verbs to the English language such as “blog,” “wiki,” and “podcast,” advertisers today have a plethora of options to manage their client’s image. In fact, the World Wide Web gurus are calling these options by a new name: Web 2.0. Who would have thought after the dot-com crash in 2000 that a Web 2.0 would ever have been invented? Although many people were a bit too ambitious about the World Wide Web at that time, e people are now older, wiser, and supposedly a lot more cautious. However, the younger generation instigated a new movement which caught the attention of their elders, and therefore, this movement was needing to be named.

The concept of Web 2.0 was first formed at a conference between Tim O’Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, and MediaLive International to refer to the “survival” of a few 2000 dot-com companies who were creating new ways to use the Web (i.e. blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.) (O’Reilly, 2005). To illustrate this concept further, Table 4.1 displays a comparison of examples that transcended from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

n general, the appearance of this new entity is evidence enough that User Generated Content will not dissipate from significance in the advertising world any time soon. In his article, “ClickZ Experts: The Pocket Guide to Consumer-Generated Media,” Pete Blackshaw reports on different types of User Generated Content that had emerged online. Inevitably, these new outlets of consumer self-expression will have an impact on the advertising industry. Already in 2005 (before the explosion of Consumer Generated Ads), Vlogs and Moblogs were established as mediums of “Consumer Generated Multimedia” (known as CGM2). Vlogs are basically video-based journals that are usually uploaded online and Moblogs are “mobile-enabled blogs that let users post photos from anywhere.” Blackshaw also notes on the side that many of the online photos are tagged with labels that read “BadMcDonaldsExperience” (Blackshaw, 2005). Although Consumer Generated Advertising seems to have positively impacted many companies, the most significant disadvantage that companies and agencies experience is that of control. The actual ad chosen in a CGA contest is under the scrutiny and mercy of the agency or company; however, who’s to stop the 1,060 Doritos entries that didn’t get chosen from being uploaded to YouTube? The reasons for rejecting an entry would still be associated with the brand, and consumer backlash from the frustration of not getting chosen may also be incorporated. Somehow, companies will have to find a way to manage and balance this corporate image with open public opinion and all the new forms of online multimedia entering our society. If this negative PR begins to proliferate, the hype around CGAs will likely be suppressed from the business side.

One of the first Moblogs Source: http://joi.ito.com/moblog/

Overall, the state of the current advertising industry is progressing with the evolution of the World Wide Web. As a result, as the Web continues to interweave society and ideas even closer together, online advertising will most likely follow suit. That is, the consumer and the brand will no longer shout out at each other but share ideas with each other, slowly moving toward an unprecedented equality.

What This Means for Advertisers

But if consumers and advertisers are sharing ideas to the point of a utopian equality of exchange, will the need for advertiser be eventually erased? Cheryl Guerin, vice president of promotions and interactive at MasterCard feels “nervous even to imply that we wouldn’t need creative directors or agencies doing [their] advertising” (Parpis, 2006). After all, from personal observation, equality of conversation between advertisers and consumers may be a bit too idealistic. People tend to follow a herd mentality and need to be told what to think and do, which is the basis for the theory of “groupthink,” and thus, advertisers need to be the shepherds to lead. Then again, James Surowiecki, author of the book, The Wisdom of Crowds, argues that an “average bunch of people can guess the weight of a cow or predict an Oscar winner better than an expert can” giving support to the view that the “Web is structurally congenial to the wisdom of crowds” (Levy & Stone, 2006). In terms of advertising, this would mean that the consumer and the advertiser would agree upon the exact positioning and attitude the brand must take to convince other people to join the brand community. If the consumer will monetarily reward a company for a certain brand image that they themselves suggest, should advertising agencies not give the consumers what they want?

By and large, advertisers will not only need to prepare for consumer engagement but strive to be one step ahead with ways in order to engage that consumer. Consumer Generated Ads may soon die out, but a successful company will be one who provides a new medium with which consumers can talk back. Therefore, advertisers need to move past the blog to commuicate with customers and onto the next step, which is quite possibly, CGM2 (Consumer Generated Multimedia).

ser Generated Content has undoubtedly been ingrained into the World Wide Web from the very beginning of the appearance of the Web. UGC has evolved with the web and is becoming stronger rather than weaker. The history of the World Wide Web indicates a healthy life for User Generated Content, and the evolution of online businesses provides a positive forecast for Consumer Generated Ads as long as the investors (i.e. clients) proceed with cautionary excitement. Some part of CGAs will survive, such as consumers providing feedback for ads, consumers getting to be in ads (as already can be seen with Dove and Geico), or consumers helping the creative create the ad. However, the actual CGA, in the form it is now (i.e. contests), will more likely than not, die out.

All in all, consumer generated ads may eventually (and probably will) lose its novelty, but one idea remains. The World Wide Web has provided a platform for interactive dialogue that has primarily leveraged the power of the consumer’s voice. Especially when the users today generating the buzz-worthy content appear to be those who “grew up with a mouse in hand” (Levy & Stone, 2006) or rather, Generation Y, User Generated Content in the advertising industry is far from extinct. The role of advertisers may evolve into more of a conversational partner with consumers rather than the platform speaker that agencies are now, but more likely than not, the need for advertisers will never die off. John Butler, creative director at Butler Shine + Stern, made a poignant observation that businesses will always “need people to come up with ideas. [And] somebody is still going to have to go through all [of it]” (Parpis, 2006). So let’s put away the cardboard signs and recap those black Sharpie pens. The consumer may expose the dirt on a few long-kept secrets, but losing our jobs should be the least of our worries.

Source: The Happy Carpenter

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