THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Comments, stories, photos, videos—any of these things can be user-generated content. Some are just a lot more difficult to make. Comments are a snap. Stories require talent. Photos are easy. Video requires production and editing (for anything more than a simple sight gag).

So how come so many companies saddle themselves with the most difficult forms of user-generated content. Yeah, video contests are cool, but they require the most effort. You’d better be thinking of a serious prize—or serious exposure—to make it worth their while. And you shouldn’t expect a whole raft of entries. Or an audience that wants to spend hours watching them.

Photos, on the other hand, are easy. Almost everyone has a digital camera, or a cameraphone. Photos aren’t hard to transfer to your computer. They don’t need editing. And, on the viewing side, the time someone spends with a photo is up to them—they can spare a single glance, or gaze into its depths for minutes.

A user-generated content drive based on photos will get more entries and more views. It will require a much smaller prize. It can even end up being a sustainable, long-term campaign. Take the example of the new Memorex website we just launched.

Every page of the site can be personalized with photos chosen from user submissions in the previous months. The payoff for the photographer isn’t thousands of dollars, or expensive gear—it’s simply exposure to the massive traffic that visits the Memorex site.

This kind of user-generated campaign is designed to for the long term. Instead of a point program, with a big prize and an ending date, this campaign runs continuously, allowing Memorex to forge a stronger connection with their audience—without forcing them to learn all about video editing.

Yes. That’s right.

Today, it was announced that social media, a niche in the wide world of marketing, has overtaken pornography in terms of popularity. I heard this while attending a webinar this morning.

In the mid 90’s, when the world looked at the web as a smorgasbord of pornography first and everything else a distant second. It was nothing to be ashamed of, unless you had to deal with Wall Street. 

Even the home entertainment industry began as a discreet pipeline of X-rated entertainment. The difference here is that it took the home entertainment industry just five years to change the paradign. It took the web business a tad longer.

I can remember a meeting I had with Microsoft in Philadelphia in the 90’s. We were meeting with a chatty young woman whose card read "Internet Evangelist.". Her mission was to check out the product environment in video stores for her PC game software. "Too much porn on the shelves. Bill doesn’t like that," she said. So, we missed out on all of their buggy and slow games that would almost always cause our tiny hard drives to crash. And, of course put the blame on the video store.

And, remember CES in years past. Big porn section. Fun and games amidst the Sony’s and Panasonics. Hey, be honest. Better parties at night. Right?

To me this announcement is more memorable than YouTube grabbing more viewers than network TV. More important than the paradigm shift of young people away from e-mail into the Sidekick world of texting and instant messaging.

Poor porn. From a leader in pre-recorded media relegated today to a second tier business model. Say it isn’t so. But it is.

Your sarcastic comments are welcome.

Let’s bring Don Draper forward to the Centric offices today. At first, he’s cool. He sees posters of our print work on the walls, he’s stunned by the big flat-panel television (and high definition shows), and he thinks that computers are just an evolution of a typewriter. Then we start going to websites.

"What the hell are these?" he asks.

We tell him: this is the way most people communicate these days. They put up MySpace pages with photos, they put up YouTube videos, they research purchases by going to corporate websites, they talk on forums. We show him iChat. He looks a little troubled.

"So this is like a videophone?"

No, no, we tell him. It’s everything. Phone. Text. Pictures. Instant messages. Video. We show him YouTube.

"Wait a minute! Anyone can put any movie they want up here?"

We tell him about copyright and DCMA. He shakes his head and looks around for the scotch tumbler. Not seeing it, he sighs and leans forward and stares at the screen. "But that won’t work. People do what they want."

We just nod.

"How much does this cost?" he asks.

To post a video? It’s free.

"No, no! The whole thing. This internet."

A lot of people get it bundled in with their cable service. If not, it costs, well, five to eight dollars (in 1960 dollars) a month for access.

"For how long? How many minutes do they get?"

Minutes? It’s connected all the time. People can use it as much as they want, pretty much.

Don looks a little pasty and gray. We show him how you can do video ads, and he waves us away. "No. That’s no good. You don’t need to finish the ad. You don’t even need to look at it. You should be doing television or print!"

We tell him, sorry, online has been proven to be 2x more effective than television and 8x more effective than print–and that the way things were going, finding newspapers and magazines to place print in might get pretty difficult in a couple of years.

He’s white and shaking now. We don’t bother pulling out the iPhone. We just let him click around on the big screen, watching as his eyes get bigger and his complexion loses even more color. "So, anyone can talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow? For free?"

Pretty much, we agree.

He shakes his head. "This won’t work. This doesn’t work. If people can talk, they can talk about how Uncle Milt died of lung cancer and how his doctor told him to quit smoking. And the words are right there for all to see!"

Or their video, we say. We show him a modern high-definition video camera. He just looks at it and asks how much it costs.

In 1960 dollars, about ninety dollars, we tell him.

He fumbles in his breast pocket and pulls out an old-fashioned pack of cigarettes, but we stop him, saying, You can’t smoke in here.

"Why?" he looks like he’s ready to cry.

You can’t smoke in any public building. It’s against the law.

Suddenly he’s pissed. "What kind of communist state are you living in? It’s like you’re living in Russia!"

We don’t have the heart to tell him, but he sees it in our eyes.

He swallows. "China?" he says, in a very small voice.

We shake our heads.

Don collapses in a chair, curling up into a fetal ball. "Send me back," he says. "Send me back! Send me baaacckk!!!"

————–

So, what’s the point of all this, you ask? The point is that we can look back at some imagined time and consider it a golden age. But the golden age of advertising wasn’t the 60’s. Sorry. Not even close. Putting up a roadblock ad that people have to see in a handful of different media was child’s play. You could buy the reach. Then it was just a matter of clear communication.

Today, media is fragmented. There are dozens of different tactics you can use online alone. And many of them require customer engagement and interaction. There are no roadblocks. There are only circus tents and beckoning shops and cool parks. And the ones that connect with people are the ones that will work. And the ones with real, honest connections to the brand are the ones that will be the most successful.

No, the golden age of advertising wasn’t the 60s. The golden age of advertising is right now.

No, not as in "it cost a million dollars to produce this widget," but as in "we got a million bucks of response from this widget."

Let’s back up a minute. Here’s the backstory: Warner Brothers came to us to help promote their new animated movie: Batman Gotham Knight. This usually means that we create a microsite and a MySpace presence. This time, however, we added a Facebook presence—and a relatively full-featured widget:

The widget allowed people to see the trailer, browse stills, and find out more about the movie, and it had an interesting social feature: When you installed the widget, you became a member of The Concerned Citizens of Gotham City. The more people who installed the widget, the brighter the Bat-signal would glow.

Pretty cool, huh? But what is much, much cooler are the numbers the widget generated:

• Before the launch of the movie, the widget generated nearly 1MM pageviews
• As of this writing, it has generated over 1.4MM pageviews

Now remember: these are pageviews, not impressions. This means that nearly 1MM more interactions were facilitated by the widget before the launch of the movie—and, even after launch, with no additional investment in the campaign, the numbers continue to grow!

Here are a few striking things we noticed:

1. The widget killed the microsite, both in terms of unique users and pageviews. Wait. Let’s repeat that: the widget beat the microsite for unique users and pageviews. These are people who might never have bothered to come to the Batman Gotham Knight microsite—and a real testimonial to the need to "get out where the people are," rather than trying to bring them to your site.

2. The widget performed about as well as a million-dollar paid media buy. To drive 1MM clickthroughs to your site, you’re looking at $500K-2MM for a typical AdWords program. Or, $1.2MM for a network banner buy with $1.20CPM and 0.1% clickthrough. Or $1MM for targeted online ads with $10CPM and 1% clickthrough.

3. The numbers keep growing, even after the campaign has ended. With a media buy, when the spending stops, your media stops. Period. End of story. With a popular widget "in the wild" on social networks, the numbers continue to grow.

"Well, yeah, that’s cool," you might be saying. "But our audience is older/less hip/not on the social networks/won’t use widgets."

Oh really? Let us introduce you to two statistics you might find interesting:

• Widgets have a 67% reach across the worldwide internet audience, according to ComScore Widget Metrix
• Over 40% of moms are on MySpace

Now, sit back, think about your brand and what you might be able to offer in a widget. And think what a long-term, persistently growing, permanent presence in the social spaces and blogosphere might do for your results.

Welcome to the world of today—a world where all the rules are changing.