User Generated Content

Crowdsourced advertising – the reality behind famous examples.

February 14, 2010 | Author Roland Hachmann

The Superbowl has yet again been a large show off for TV ads. Even though some argue that the quality of ads has been lower than the previous years, one thing stuck out again: the spots not produced by a typical “Madison Avenue Agency”. Two Doritos spots, allegedly created by consumers, a Google ad produced internally,

NY Times hence wrote an article with the catchy title “Do-it-yourself super ads“, subtitle: “be afraid, Madison Avenue. Very afraid”. The article mentions the user generated spots and their “ranking” on hulu.com and twitter, deducting that consumer know best what consumers want to see.

Well, that’s only one part of the story. And shall we say: the badly researched part of the story.

AdLab busts that story by stating a few facts that the NY Times should, in fact, have researched.

The first Doritos spot “Underdog” was created by Joshua Svoboda a 24 year old, who works as a creative director. The second spot “House Rules” was created by a writer/director from Hollywood.

Even the other Doritos commercials from the previous years plus other “UGC” clips were apparently created by people already working in film related businesses, states the above mentioned article.

So it wasn’t brand fans or advocates who put in their efforts to create a brand message for the brand they like. It was creative people, producers, writers, who were probably more interested in promoting their own “brand” through the PR associated with the clip.

It’s not really that surprising. However, the fact that this has not been picked up by the media correctly is suprising. In a way, I also fell for what might be the reason for the whole ignorance: the story of consumers creating ads with only a few hundred Dollars production costs, that are shown during the Superbowl with a mediabudget of more than $2.5 million, reaching more than 100 million viewers – it’s too good.

I work in an ad agency, so I shouldn’t like the idea of consumer generated ads. Yet due to my interest in social media marketing I did in fact like the idea. (And with everything connected to the setup of the contest, there would still be enough scope for agency work…) So it is rather disappointing to find out about the truth behind these famous examples.

Posted in Ad News, Television, User Generated Content | Tags: Advertising Links, Doritos, Superbowl, TV, UGC, User Generated Content | No Comments »

2010 technology and social media predictions meta list.

December 23, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

Every year around this time one can find many predictions about the new year in terms of tech & social media trends. So in order to get an overview myself, I have started this post with a collection and summary of the various predictions I could find:

Jackie Huba predicts that Social Media will get boring and offers an amusing “in” and “out” list. Background fact: Social Media will become a regular part of daily business (and hence boring).
Pete Blackshaw wrote in an Ad Age column that social media marketers will need to embrace three critical words in 2010: Serve, Shrink and Simplify. Since you need to log on to Ad Age, you can read some excerpts on Pete’s blog. The main idea: service is the new marketing, our screens are shrinking, make things easer/reduce complexity for your customers.
The groundswell team lists 6 predictions, but you get an excerpt. Nevertheless, you can read the topline predictions on the groundswell blog. Overarching theme is, according to the blog, that social technology will be a mainstram part of what marketers do.
eMarketer lists 12 predictions for 2010. The insights include “future monetization models, the effect of transparency on advertising, social and search, mobile, social commerce, public relations, social advertising, Twitter, video and mom/pop internet usage”.
TrendsSpotting Blog has compiled a list of trends from several social media experts who send their input in 140 characts, hat tipping to twitter.
TrendsSpotting’s 2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters
View more documents from Taly Weiss.
Read/WriteWeb has two different kinds of lists: General predictions and social media predictions. The general predictions consists of the views of 9 contributors from rww and cover a wide variety of topics concerning social media, mobile, cloud computing, Google/Twitter/Facebook/bing, etc. The social media predictions list 10 ways social media will change in 2010, i.e. how it will become part of everyday life, being increasingly used on mobile devices, ROI will become more important (and will be measured), etc.
Mitch Joel predicts, that 2010 will be the year that we shift from the advertising age to the marketing age. Strictly speaking, he writes, it’s not a prediction, it is something that is happening right now.
The NY Times “bits” blog writes about 2010 being the year of the tablet PC. Quite a few companies seem to be on the verge of presenting their versions, but everyone is, of course eager for Apple to release theirs!
Mashable has a post about 2010 being the year of the data. Data that should and will be used by every profession – journalism, marketing, SEO, Advertising, PR, etc. User data (static and behavioural data, I suppose) is becoming ever more important. Somehow I don’t think this is a trend just for 2010. It has been going on in 2009 already and will stay with us forever…
Pete Cashmore of Mashable wrote a special for CNN Tech about the 10 web trends to watch in 2010. the keywords are: Realtime, location, augmented reality, content curation, cloud computing, internet TV and Movies, convergence conundrum, social gaming, mobile payments, fame abundance and privacy scarcity.

As I find more predictions, I will add them (let me know if you know of any).

Posted in Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Media, Trends, User Generated Content, Web 2.0 | Tags: Cloud Computing, Facebook, Marketing, Mobile, Predictions, Social Media, Technology, Trends, Twitter | No Comments »

Social Media ROI: the video

November 21, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

Lots of praise and good&relevant facts about social media return on investment:

Posted in Communities, Digital Marketing, Social Media, User Generated Content, Videos | Tags: ROI, Social Media, Video | 1 Comment »

Poptent – crowdsourcing video productions

November 9, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

Not sure, how new this site is, but poptent.net looks rather interesting. It’s a site for connecting brands with freelance videographers:

Poptent is the best place for independent and freelance videographers to build their portfolios, connect with companies and brands for commercial work. Here you will find the best and brightest up and coming creative minds in the business. Hire them. Collaborate with them. Join them. We’re building a crowdsourcing revolution and we want you to be a part of it. Become part of our community by clicking the JOIN NOW button.

It looks like some form of agency 2.0, and at the same time it raises the same debate that comes up when brands ask for creative submissions without guaranteeing a reward for every submission. Videocreators get the chance of having their video selected by a well known brand, yet they risk loosing their initial investment (time&money) if their video isn’t selected. And the brand gets a range of creations to choose from without having to pay for every single one.

Here is an example of a current project, asking for video content for snickers:

You know Snickers®, that unique, delicious, and substantial combination of peanuts, chocolate, caramel and nougat.
This assignment is to develop video content starring Snickers®. They are looking for either traditional ‘commercials’ or pass-along (viral) videos — original, authentic and entertaining Snickers® content which consumers will pass along, and use as inspiration for their own content creation.
Your challenge is to be creative, so don’t just follow the approach of previous Snickers® campaigns. You can either:
• Produce a fun, engaging traditional :30 second commercial
• Or produce a pass-along (viral) video of about :30 seconds in length …you choose
Your creative ‘bulls eye’ is males age 18-34. Snickers® has played a memorable role in ‘guy culture,’ with a long and celebrated history as the ‘go-to-bar’ for satisfying hunger.
You could earn $5,000 for each video they purchase or one of the $2000in guaranteed awards. Register below and read the Creative Brief for all the details and some more delicious inspiration.

$5.000 doesn’t sound like much to me, but I guess it depends on what they want to do with it.

Posted in Branding, Ideas, Social Media, User Generated Content, Videos | Tags: Contest, Crowdsourcing, User Generated Content, Video | 2 Comments »

Some results from the Fiesta Movement activity

October 3, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

I already blogged about the Fiesta Movement social media activity. Now there are some results, published at adrants:

The program — which included a test-drive program — has elicited the interest of about 50,000 potential buyers, 97% of which don’t drive a Ford at present.

In toto, official Fiesta Movement content has drawn 4.3 million YouTube views, 540,000 flickr views and 3 million Twitter impressions.

These are quite remarkable results, indeed!

And all this is achieved with “$0 ad spent and a fraction of marketing costs”. I assume it really does compare well to traditional advertising efforts.

Yet communicating a figure of $0 seems to send out the wrong signal. The total costs (for 100 cars, the website, the staff at Ford, etc.) might be “a fraction” of what is usually spend, but somehow I can’t imagine this whole campaing having been “cheap”.

Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media, User Generated Content, Web 2.0 | Tags: Crowdsourcing, Fiesta Movement, Opinion Leader Marketing, Social Media, User Generated Content | No Comments »

Tweets about brands are about information, not sentiment

October 2, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

Quite a few brands are probably carefully eyeing twitter trends with reference to their brand name, incase of negative remarks.

Now there is a study looking into how users are actually talking about brands on twitter. At ReadWriteWeb there is a post stating that tweets about brands are more often about information rather than sentiment.

According to the study, which looked at 150,000 tweets, 11.1% of the brand-related tweets were information-providing while 18.1% were information-seeking. The latter of these two is especially useful to companies looking to understand what questions and concerns customers have about their products. However, the large majority of the tweets – 48.5% – were simply comments made in passing which mentioned the brand but whose primary focus was something else.

In only roughly 23% users were expressing sentiment (positive or negative) about brands.

So why is that? Why don’t people express so many negative opinions on twitter as compared to the rest of the web? ReadWriteWeb assumes that it is the easy and quick handling of twitter which results in many more positive or neutral, fact based chatter.

That does make sense to me. People will go through a lot of effort, writing long and nasty blog posts, when they’re fed up. But they won’t do the same for positive or even neutral remarks, unless the brand experience was rather extraordinary.

Posted in Branding, Digital Culture, Marketing, Social Media, User Generated Content | Tags: Blogs, brands, research, Study, Twitter | No Comments »

Hornbach is sponsoring ambitious DIY projects of users.

September 2, 2009 | Author Roland Hachmann

While I am scanning and writing about all sorts of crowdsourcing initiatives by brands, I couldn’t help noticing a new campaign in Germany asking users to participate in a DIY contest. Guess I couldn’t miss it, since it was plastered all over spiegel.de, Germanys biggest online news source, which I happen to visit almost 10x a day.

Hornbach is a German DIY store that everyone watching tool time would enjoy. They had TV spots running for quite some time, in which people completed seemingly complicated projects around the house – refurbishing bathrooms, redesigning gardens, etc.

It is a logical progression to start a contest asking users for their most ambitious DIY projects. The whole setup does not convince due to originallity. There have been better ideas for contests.

It excites due to size of presence. Advertising for a whole day on spiegel.de (and I guess other large sites, too) is no small deal. Also, they’re willing to sponsor up to 10 projects with up to 15k Euros per project. Also, I should add: they’re not just asking for any project, rather, they are looking for extreme, original (what’s the translation for “wahnwitzig”?) ideas. Nothing of the ordinary kind.

In the contest conditions, they of course make sure that they can publish photos and names of participants, as well as reserving the right to document and publish the whole project they will sponsor. Unless they only receive applications of complete idiots, which I obviously doubt, they will have some fine material for future advertising, authentic, close to the community, relevant and most likely touching. We’ll see in a few months time, I’ll keep you posted.

Posted in Ad News, Communities, Marketing, User Generated Content | Tags: Contest, Crowdsourcing, DIY, Germany, Hornbach | 1 Comment »