People who spend their spare time crafting homemade commercials for brands they love may need to find another hobby.
One of the hottest trends in advertising over the past few years has been so-called user-generated content, ads made by fans expressing their love for a product or service. Companies jumped on the democratic wave, building entire campaigns around contests to find the best amateur ad, sometimes promising a prize as grand as airing the winning spot on a high-profile broadcast such as the Super Bowl.
But now, a number of brands are taking a more measured approach, having their ad agencies co-create commercials with fans, in a process that may bring in new ideas but leaves the final decisions firmly in the hands of the professionals. The changes serve as a tacit admission that much of the fan-created content wasn't very good, while also underlining the continuing tussle between the pros and amateurs.
Take Doritos. In the summer of 2010, Frito Lay Canada mounted a contest in which it called on fans to create entertaining ads, post them to a special website, and then spur viewership of their video by working the contacts in their social networks. The campaign attracted more than 1,100 entries, from slick numbers featuring real actors shot on well-lit sets to painfully clumsy efforts that were ultimately seen by only a handful of people. In total, the ads pulled in more than seven million views.
The vice-president of marketing at Frito Lay Canada crowed: "The Doritos Viralocity program is all about handing control of the brand over to consumers."
But earlier this year, Frito Lay took back some of that control with its follow-up Doritos contest. During the Canadian broadcast of the Super Bowl, the brand ran an ad which appeared to end halfway through the storyline, and then issued a request for viewers to submit their written ideas on how the spot should be resolved. By the time the contest wrapped up three months later, almost 30,000 ideas had been submitted – far more than the Viralocity effort. That hints at one reason for the different approach.
A new from Volkswagen Canada takes a similar tack. In early June, the company rolled out a pair of ads that together told the first two chapters of a story. In the first, a fellow in his early 30s drives around and around a downtown city block in his VW Golf, pausing briefly whenever he passes a particular apartment until, finally, he stops outside the building, plucks a ring box from the passenger seat, and heads inside. In the second spot, he and three buddies drive through the night before arriving at a church for his wedding.
Both spots invite viewers to "help us write the next chapter," and refer them to the website vwdriveuntil.ca, which sends them to the brand's Facebook page. There, its 359,000 fans can weigh in on every step of the production phase for the third commercial in the series: submitting script ideas, choosing the car that will be featured, casting the part of the wife, selecting the music, and deciding which cut of the commercial works best. (On Thursday, viewers could also watch a live feed of the actual shoot.) The final decisions are put to a vote.
"We asked for suggestions, but we are the ones who have been supplying the scripts," noted Christina Yu, the executive creative officer of the Toronto boutique agency Red Urban, which created the campaign.
"I guess it's crowd-sourcing, in the sense that we're getting people's opinions on things, but we also wanted to make it about democracy. 'Volkswagen' translates into 'the people's car.' It was founded on the democratization of mobility, and we thought it might be interesting for fans to participate in this. We've dubbed this 'the people's ad.'"
Ms. Yu acknowledges that there was some discussion about having viewers create and submit their own fully finished ad, and airing the best one. "We thought this was more interesting. It made it easier for consumers to participate."
And ease is becoming more important, since companies have realized they need to remove as many barriers to engagement as possible. When contests ask people to go the effort of making a video, "there's a great amount of effort involved – and there's many campaigns asking for similar things," explained Sherry Lyons, the director of marketing communications for Toshiba Canada.
Together with Intel, Toshiba is currently rolling out its first social media campaign, which folds the low-tech engagement of fans through Twitter and Facebook into a glossy Hollywood-style production. Inside, which the companies are calling "a social film experience," is a short film helmed by D.J. Caruso (director of the thriller Disturbia) and starring Emmy Rossum ( Phantom of the Opera) as a woman who is trapped in a strange room with nothing to help her escape but a Toshiba laptop and an untraceable Internet connection.
The film, running between 20 and 30 minutes, will be unveiled over the course of a few weeks on theinsideexperience.com, beginning July 25. As each chapter is posted, Toshiba will ask viewers to send helpful clues to the protagonist via Twitter and Facebook, some of which will be incorporated into the film by appearing on her laptop. This week the company also kicked off an online casting call to find someone who will appear on the character's laptop in a video cameo.
There's a palpable tension in both the Toshiba and VW projects between the continuing urge for control by the professionals – the brands themselves, their ad agencies, media planners, and production companies – and people who increasingly want to treat brands as pop culture artifacts, raw material to be played with and shaped in their never-ending quest to create something new.
And that tension can be seen even in the advertising of the brands that position themselves as proponents of the democratizing wave. A couple of months ago, Google signed Lady Gaga to appear in an ad for its Chrome browser. She invited fans to upload videos to YouTube of them dancing and lip-synching to her new song Edge of Glory; dozens of the submitted clips were then cut into a rousing 90-second spot, which functioned as an ad for both the song and the browser.
The final frames of the ad read: "The Web is what you make of it." Or, at least, what Google's ad agency makes of it.
Simon Houpt