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Ten Tips & Principles of Consumer Generated Advertising Campaigns

Recently, my colleague Max Kalehoff and I put together a list of "Top Ten Principles of Consumer Consumer Generated Ad Campaigns."  Max added a few additional thoughts on top of this list in his most recent MediaPost column.  You may also recall an earlier blog post on this topic in the context of Super Bowl advertising. Key message: by all means test the waters, but keep a good check list in front of you! 

1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals: Ensure that your strategy aligns with well-defined goals and objectives, and create a measurement framework for program planning, tracking, adjusting and evaluating. A consumer-generated campaign is not a license to veer into irrelevance or sloppiness.

2. Keep It Authentic: Leverage the full creative power of the participants and don’t set narrow guidelines on the creative. The traditional media framework for inserting creative is losing its effectiveness, even among the pros. Allow for flexibility in shape, form and raw spontaneity.

3. Be Transparent: Don’t play fast and loose with the fact that the brand facilitated content creation. Avoid a potential backlash by being completely transparent.

4. Encourage Advocacy: Don’t be shy about allowing entrants to vote for their favorites and encourage their friends and family to vote. This builds momentum around the campaign, and ensures that the best content rises to the top.

5. Empower Syndication: Make it simple to upload, simple to share, simple to embed on blogs and other community and video platforms. Let the people become the distribution and evangelical pipeline.

6. Tap The Long Tail: Don’t hesitate to leverage non-winners for other marketing purposes. Embrace them as passionate and loyal stakeholders, and use the Web site as a repository for their rich content.

7. Capture The Moment: Capitalize on “great brand moments” when consumers are highly vested and more likely to advocate, such as new product launches, purchases, or actual brand use and enjoyment. This will help passionate, credible and authentic storylines rise to the top.

8. Be Consistent: If you create an environment of dialogue and interaction, stakeholders will notice inconsistencies across other customer touch points or company silos. While the campaign may end, its equity around “participation, community and feedback” may live on. Decide beforehand if your brand’s cultural values, resources and commitment will sustain after the campaign ends.

9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation: You’ve got to take the bad with the good. While a good strategy will acknowledge and plan for detractors, the reality is that everyone is empowered to publish. Accept and embrace this truth, and leverage criticism or deprecation as a gift of feedback and opportunity.

10. Move From Campaign To Platform: Campaigns may have clear beginnings and endings, but there may be dimensions of your program that want to live on forever. Prepare a platform to facilitate and leverage sustained engagement and brand return.

Letting Go by Letting It Out! The Co-Creation March Continues

And so the "co-creation" movement beats on!  Essentially, brands are  inviting other consumers to participate in the advertising creation process.  One could easily argue this one of the highest forms of consumer engagement, although it's hardly a given that any brand can pull this off.  In this particular case, a consumer packaged goods player, Kimberly Clark is unloading a trifecta of participatory Web 2.0 offerings: video upload, a brand sponsored blog, and a portal for viewing videos. In some respects, the brand site where all this is hosted now looks a bit more like the home page of Technorati than a typical CPG site -- tags, easy search, playlists and all.  Importantly, such functionality sets the stage for the site to always look freshly updated to visiting consumers -- this is contrast to 90% of the largely static consumer goods sites out there. 

Reason to Speak? One key requisite for making these things work (beyond the need to convince the brand legal department that consumer participation and informal brand communication, e.g. blogging, has more upside than downside) is ensuring the campaign rests around a genuine, emotion grounded "feedback moment."  (Think less about "reason to believe" than "reason to speak.") For brands like Kleenex, there's no short shortage of compelling stories to draw from.  The key balancing act for brands is to find the right balance between "authenticity" and "advertising."  If you set too many requirements for what the consumer can say -- almost like a strict "RFP" -- the content starts to feel like outsourced (lower cost) advertising.  Then again, if you open up the creative pipeline too much, the message can start to veer off-equity. (Recall, the GM "create your own ad" contest.)  Kleenex's competitor, P&G's Puffs also has a participatory element, but it's more form-fitted to a very structured path of expression; still potentially appealing (especially to brand enthusiasts), but not nearly as sticky from a sharing or social currency perspective. 

Keeping the Participation Principle Credible: One other important issue: in order for such campaigns to be credible, there needs to be 100% consistency in how the brand invites expression.  You can't have a Web 2.0 "participation elements" standing next to a Web 1.0 consumer affairs listening pipe.  In the case of Kleenex, there appears to be solid, if not directional, alignment (see welcome and inviting face to the left); the desire to listen seems sincere.  You'll also recall this is why I felt Dove Real Beauty campaign was so breakthrough: there was consistency across the entire brand campaign and consumer tough-points around the value of the consumer voice.  The advertised campaign was all about self-expression, self-esteem, and empowerment, but the "willingness to listen" factor cut across all dimensions of the brand experience, including consumer affairs.  This was a major theme of a presentation I recently delivered to the executive board of the  Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), and it's a point I will hammer away at again as a keynote at SOCAP's annual convention next fall.  I summarize a few of these points in a recent ClickZ article, as well as in a panel last week at the University of Chicago. 

Full  Disclosure: The three brand examples I've referenced above are from companies with whom my company has done business.  I am not involved in, or associated with, any of these campaigns.

More on "Pay to Say" Advertising

My work colleague Max Kalehoff just penned an excellent column for MediaPost that continues the critical conversation on the "Pay to Say" marketing movement.  Good fodder in anticipation of next week's WOMMA conference, where WOM/CGM ethics will be discussed along with a host of other topics. Writes Max:

With consumer-generated media and ensuing consumer empowerment one of the most disruptive trends and opportunities in marketing and media today, it’s time for these pay-to-post services, as well as bloggers, advertisers and others, to step up to the plate and tackle this hazy territory of disclosure. It’s confusing. It’s messy. It’s a liability. And, yes, there will always be scum and fraud on the Internet. In its current state, however, this quasi-legitimate space threatens the greater good and integrity of our online community.

Importantly, among the action items he recommends, he encourages trade groups beyond just WOMMA to step up to the plate to address these difficult (and obvious) questions. I could not agree more.  From IAB and the BBB to the ANA and the AAA, everyone has been unsettlingly quite on these critical (and quite obvious) issues.  These issues are now way bigger that WOMMA. Who will step up to the plate?

CGM Meets Primetime!

Tomorrow is a really big CGM milestone for me.  I'm helping organize one of the first-ever "summits" focused exclusively on consumer-generated media.  This is part of my real job at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.  We're having 100 or so clients here in New York for a deep, extended conversation on all aspects of the measurability and actionability of CGM.  Should be fascinating as there's such a diversity of approaches to leveraging CGM.  Needless to say, I'm pumped!

Shutter Controlled Co-Creation

Here's an interesting example of brand-influenced "CGM," or better yet, co-creation.  Nikon recently sent out their new D80 camera to handful of users of the Flickr photo-sharing service, and asked them to use the camera as they see fit.  They then took submissions from these early users of the camera and assembled the best photos into a 3-page insert in the latest issue of Business Week.  (10/4 cover date.)   The agency's role?  Organizing the photos and drafting the copy.  Again, not 100% organic consumer-generated media, but far from "traditional" advertising.  Here's a Download Nikon-Ad.pdf .  (Thanks to Chris Thilk for the heads-up.)