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November 2006 - Strategy Magazine
Media

Everyone wants their 15 megs of fame
What's a brand to do? CGM strategies: move from a planning mind-set of control to one of hopeful influence

by Patti Summerfield
page 26

It's a force to be reckoned with - and it's either a marketer's worst nightmare or their new best buddy. Whether it's called consumer-generated media (CGM) or user-generated content (UGC), it means the customer is no longer simply king, she is the publisher and broadcaster who controls the future of your brand and the judge and jury who delivers the verdict.

With blogs, chat rooms, podcasts, YouTube, and a myriad of social networking such as MySpace in the mix, CGM is stealing fire from traditional media and ads.

Until recently, marketers have shied away from CGM because they had no control over content that was often racy - and while everyone has the utmost confidence in their brand, it doesn't always extend to what the great unwashed might say about it online.

Obviously that was a problem for some of the sites as well. Even with its immense following, video-sharing site YouTube had a hard time attracting ads. It found a solution to some of the unease when it countered copyright concerns in early October by signing an agreement with CBS, Showtime and CSTV Networks in the U.S. to host their video clips and split the ad revenue. YouTube has a similar deal with Sony BMG and Universal Music Group for music videos. This is all good news for Google, which bought YouTube last month for more than US$1.6 billion.

"You cannot ignore the consumer-generated revolution. This is not five people peer-to-peer sharing, it has a mass momentum that is unstoppable," says Paul Woolmington, founding partner of Naked Communications of NYC. "Marketers think they're in control because they're creating advertising and pushing it out to consumers. But that same consumer could be writing a blog about a product. So are the marketers in control? No."

Woolmington explains it as everyone still wanting their 15 minutes of fame - only now repackaged as their 15 megs of fame.

Enter almost any major brand name into a search engine and you get a list of thousands, or even millions, of sites - only a fraction of which are controlled by the brand in question. Enter a brand name and the word "blogs" and you will find out how the public truly feels about your product.

So how can a marketer hitch a ride on this wave? One route is the quasi-CGM model, wherein brands invite consumers to co-create but attempt to have some control parameters on the participation. Companies such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Levi's and McDonald's have invited online video and photo submissions as part of contests. In Canada, Unilever has just invited consumers to "Be Famous For Your Food" by submitting their recipes online for cooking with Hellmann's mayonnaise for a chance to be profiled in one of its TV commercials.

Although the global Hellmann's account was consolidated with Ogilvy & Mather New York in June, the "Be Famous For Your Food" campaign was conceived and created by Zig in Toronto. Shelley Brown, director of strategic planning for the agency, says the decision to invite consumers to participate came out of the "Be Famous For Your Food" creative idea.

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