Slippery Slope of User-Generated Content

There's an amusing piece in the New York Times about companies looking to customers to create ads and the pain of the experience.

This is a concept that I think is flawed because the companies generally aren't approaching it the right way. You aren't going to get a professional spot from the vast majority of consumers. The writing, production qualities, and acting are more likely than not going to be bad. There's a reason people make their livings doing this sort of thing. If everyone could do it, you'd see much better marketing on television.

You also aren't going to get a whole bunch of spots that sees your product the way you'd like to see it:

One of the most viewed Heinz videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler [an advertising executive not involved in the Heinz consumer commercial competition] saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Yup, often people will mock your brand, your product, what part your product plays in life, and your reasons for looking to consumers for your advertising content.

But companies like Heinz could learn something by removing the ketchup-tinted glasses. Forget for a second that you would hope to get a useful commercial out of this. Why not use it as a window into what consumers are thinking. How do they react to your product? What associations do they make subconsciously that come out through the work? You've essentially asked for an admittedly self-selecting set of customers to hold forth on what you do. For a company, this is the value that the Internet really provides - not using the web to promote your own view, but seeing how you are perceived and how people perceive themselves. Look for archetypes, themes, and associations that might help you talk the customer's language. That makes a whole lot more sense than hoping to find the advertising needle in the haystack of would-be funniest home videos.