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Consumer Generated Commercials

Recently, advertisers have been making more use of consumer generated commercials. These consumer generated commercials are usually produced on social media sites such as YouTube and Bebo. For example, Doritos' "Crash the Superbowl VIII" promotion which asked Doritos consumers to compete in making the best Doritos commercial for the 2014 Superbowl. The maker of the winning commercial received $1 million and time on the set of The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Though this is a very innovative and growing means of advertising, it has its advantages and disadvantages.

A couple of the advantages of consumer generated advertising are creativity and exposure. 

Consumer generated commercials make it easier for companies to get creative with advertising their products. Advertising firms only have so many employees with a limited amount of ideas. Ideas generated by inside and outside advertising firms are more finite than those generated by millions of consumers. 

Commercials generated by consumers also help create exposure for small or growing companies and their products. If a company does not have a lot of money to create commercials, setting up a consumer generated commercial contest may be cost effective and exposing. Even with a humble prize of $1,500 enough people would respond to such a competition and help a small company, possibly lacking an advertising department, utilize creative commercial ideas and make commercials that reach new and existing customers (through YouTube, etc).

A couple disadvantages to consumer generated advertising are clutter and awareness.

 There is a lot of clutter associated with sites such as YouTube. There are millions of videos, advertisements, uploads, topics, and discussions on YouTube. Unless someone is  actively seeking videos about a specific product than it would be very difficult for any message to get through and above all of the clutter. 

People may be aware of the incentives associated with consumer generated commercials and realize their testimonials have little to do with actual product quality. As with any commercials, people may not believe the word of an endorser for these reasons. Most consumer generated commercials give consumers an incentive for doing so. For example, Carl's Junior's effort to to introduce the new Portobello Mushroom Six-Dollar Burger to Young men, the fast food company hired nine polar YouTube video creators in the campaign through a video putting a spin on CKE brand's Paris Hilton eating a burger commercial (Belch 506). Each creator was paid a flat fee for their video and a notice on each video revealed that they received compensation (Belch 506).

References 

Belch, GE. and Belch, MA.  Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective, 9th Edition.  McGraw-Hill Companies.  2012.

Doritos Crash the Superbowl VIII. (n.d.).Doritos Crash the Superbowl VIII. Retrieved March 24, 2014, from https://doritoscrashthesuperbowl.thismoment.com/us-en/base/about

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