Is That A Mob in Your User Base?
Or, there ain’t no such thing as a free ad.
User-generated advertising sounds like the greatest thing since, well, advertising was invented. Have people who use your products submit their own content. Hell, have them make their own ads. They’re more than happy to sign off rights for any use you can imagine.
No more cranky creatives, no more big retainers, no more commercial directors who don’t know what this thing called a “budget” is. It sounds like a dream come true.
But.
There are big buts. Five of them, to be precise.
But the cost of infrastructure. How are you going to get those user-generated clips? You’ll need a site to host them. If you want an idea of how popular they are, you’ll want to have a user-rating system. And hey, while you’re at it, why don’t you add podcasts of the most popular content and blogs for commentary. Suddenly you have a whole team of interactive people and a half-million dollar development bill.
But the cost of editing. You know how hard it is to get 80 minutes of video down to a couple of 30-second spots. Imagine how it is if you have 80,000 minutes of video. Or 800,000. Remember, shooting is cheap. Anyone can do it with a hand-me-down free video camera. Hell, they can shoot high def if they want to spend $1,000. With a bar to entry that low, you’re going to have more content than you can handle. Much more. So let’s add the cost of a team of editorial assistants to cull the worst. Are you seeing another dozen staff on the payroll?
But the cost of advertising. Remember, you have to get the word out about your user-generated content-gathering campaign. Sure, you can let it propagate online, but do you want it to be limited only to select communities? See below. So, add a campaign for your campaign. The costs keep going up, don’t they?
But the cost of mob rule. “Editors?” you say. “Heck with that. We’ll have the users rate the content, and pick only the top 1%. After all, they’re our audience anyway. What resonates with them will be perfect for the campaign. Ahem. Not so fast. Who says they’re your audience? There are entire communities of people (think MySpace, Fark, SomethingAwful) of people who have a lot of time on their hands and have nothing better to do than skew user-rated content. After all, one of their friends probably put the content there in the first place. The friend with the biggest network suddenly is at #1 on your video charts. Does this accurately reflect your audience? Maybe not. Do you want to put this on prime time and find out? This could be the biggest cost of all.
But the cost of off-brand resonance. Okay. You’ve taken the user-generated, user-rated route. What happens when that shiny new ad is strongly off-brand–and that off-brand message resonates with a broad audience. Fear the negative ad that has a shred of truth. There are many great companies with sub-audiences that have had less than stellar experiences. And they’re vocal. Are you ready to take the chance of breaking your brand?
Okay. It now sounds like we’re sounding the death knell for user-generated ads. We aren’t. They can be stunningly effective for small, focused groups. If you’re looking to reach a college-age geek audience, you’ll probably be very happy with the results of a self-propagated, user-rated campaign across SomethingAwful and Slashdot.
If you’re a broader brand, finding the balance between an editorial board that’s larger than a typical network news team, and user-rated content that isn’t steered by a mob is the real challenge. It can be done, but it can take some very fancy footwork.
And it ain’t free.
