More Marketers Cozy Up To User-Created Content

Often thought of as the dregs of the Internet, user-generated content is getting a second look from advertisers, who are using new technology and approaches to benefit from consumers' willingness to create and share content for free. Advertisers have gotten savvier about incorporating this type of content into their ad campaigns, and there are fewer risks of the type associated with putting untargeted ads in venues like message boards—such as last month's horror story for Pepsi, State Farm Insurance and others, when their ads appeared next to user-created Yahoo! chat rooms for older men to meet young girls. Some Web publishers, like College-Humor.com and Heavy.com, have sought to capitalize on such content by aggregating it themselves to give advertisers the assurance of editorial control. (The sites also benefit from having minimal overhead, thanks to consumers' free content.) Heavy.com, a video and animation site with advertisers such as Absolut and Unilever, carries several hours of content submitted by users. "It's almost as if you're bored just watching something, you'd rather make it yourself," said David Carson, the New York company's CEO. To make brand advertisers comfortable using its far-flung AdSense network, Google this spring introduced a site-targeting feature that allows advertisers to, in effect, create mini-networks of similar niche Web sites. "The great thing about some of these technologies is it gives you the opportunity to re-aggregate a distributed mass," said Patrick Keane, Google's head of advertising sales strategy.Despite the proliferation of blogs, their often-irreverent tone and unpredictable nature has made some advertisers hesitant to include them as a media option. Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, which places ads on 800 blogs, said ignoring blogs because of their unpredictable environment only hurts advertisers. While agreeing that the overwhelming majority of the estimated 12 million blogs are not very valuable to advertisers, he pointed to hundreds of niche sites that offer valuable, influential audiences. "If advertisers aren't going to [market on blogs], they're just going to be living in the land of irrelevance," he said.Some brand advertisers are taking the plunge. Audi leaned on blogs to reach an influential audience as part of its spring "The Art of the Heist" campaign for its A3 compact car. In conjunction with Audi's interactive agency, Havas' McKinney + Silver, GMD Studios, an Orlando digital media firm, helped design a blog component that ran on over 400 blogs through Blogads, Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. To play up the conversational feel of blogs, some of the ad placements included excerpts and links to blog entries that mentioned the campaign, a BMW Films-like online narrative that invites user participation. Still, blogs are "completely under-bought," said Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios, of blogs. "It's a buyer's market."In April, Volvo started a yearlong campaign with MSN to sponsor its blog section, MSN Spaces, which has 14 million Web journals set up. Volvo set up a blogging resource center and a "What's Your Story?" section to highlight interesting blog entries. In three months, the area has generated 1 million visitors and driven 150,000 page views to the featured blogs, according to MSN. Anna Papadopoulos, associate media director at Havas' Euro RSCG, Volvo's ad agency, said the key to the campaign was associating Volvo with the blogging experience, rather than the content itself. "The overall benefit of doing these programs outweighs the risk," Papadopoulos said. In addition to advertising on consumer media, some advertisers are looking to act as conduits for their consumers to create and share content. Omnicom Group's Atmosphere BBDO recently embarked on such an effort for Cingular Wireless, which is running ads for a prize promotion that solicits real-life camera-phone shots interpreting the company's "five bars" brand icon. The campaign idea was hatched after the Atlanta cellular company received such photos unsolicited. "We're seeing consumers interact and participate in marketing efforts in a much more experiential way," said Andreas Combuechen, Atmosphere BBDO's CEO, who plans to eventually incorporate the consumer brand ideas into Cingular ads. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also opened up the fertile online real estate of photo-sharing sites. New Line Cinema is using CNET Networks-owned Webshots to promote the July 15 release of The Wedding Crashers, inviting users to submit their own photos of party adventures in a "Life's a Party" contest. Still, some marketers remain unwilling to take the risk. Stuart Bogaty, a senior partner at WPP Group's mOne Worldwide, said his Fortune 500 clients would mostly continue to shy away from unmonitored user-generated content, most of which he thinks is better off not being commercialized. "We as an industry have to figure out if there's a way to advertise in a blog and in somehow disconnect the advertiser from the particular content," he said. On the other hand, said Cory Treffiletti, svp and managing director of Isobar's Carat Interactive in San Francisco, in order to fully tap into consumer passions, advertisers need to give up a measure of control in an increasingly distributed media environment. He said, "Whatever your consumers perceive your brand is, it is."

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More Marketers Cozy Up To User-Created Content

Brian Morrissey

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