Making User-Generated Ads Work

Matthew Ingram does a good job of explaining what’s wrong with this story on how Heinz’s user-generated ad contest didn’t work very well:

” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0? advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.

As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.

I think there are three other factors here that are worth keeping in mind. First, it sounds like part of the problem is that they did too little—not too much—to harness the wisdom of crowds. Users can not only produce ads–they can filter them too. If there were a ton of ads submitted and most of them were crap, why not have the crowd help weed out the bad stuff? Set up a site showing all the submissions (and making it easy to embed them in other sites) and let website visitors vote on the best selections. You probably don’t want to just run whatever the crowd suggests, but you could choose 10 or 20 finalists that way, and then you can pick the best 5 from those.

Second, Heinz seems not to appreciate the fact that the community is often as valuable as the product it produces. If you’ve got 1000 people pitching commercials and 100,000 people voting on them, that’s a pretty valuable asset in and of itself. Those are 100,000 people who are intensely engaged with your brand. They’re likely to send their favorite videos to their friends, to post them on their blogs, etc. They’re people who are more likely to participate in surveys and focus groups, to evangelize your product to their friends and co-workers, etc. So even if the ads produced are mediocre, the effort might be worth the money purely as a way of building intense customer loyalty among several thousand Internet-savvy consumers.

Finally, peer production is always a hit-or-miss proposition. If you want 100 percent certainty of getting a usable product, user-generated content isn’t a good choice. But sometimes, user-generated content can be just fantastic:

This user-generated video was arguably the most memorable ad in this year’s Super Bowl. If user-generated content has even a 10 percent chance of producing an ad like this, that seems worth the time and expense.

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