Meme Alert: Jon Fine at BusinessWeek has coined terms for "consumer-generated marketing": Citizen Marketing, as well as Citizen Advertising (link). Here's his reason on why citizen advertising will never work for products like Clorox bleach:
Not every company
has wild-eyed devotees. So thus far, citizen ads mostly push products
that people adore—Chevy asked fans to submit ideas for its Super Bowl
spot—or those that target young men, like Doritos. The people who
create them have already joined the fan club and bought the T-shirt (or
they're so rabid they make their own). There's a reason why the
National Football League asked fans to submit Super Bowl ad ideas.
Football freaks get very geeked-out about their sport, as do those who
post homemade Apple ads to YouTube.
Makes sense - but go a step further, and you'll find a few more interesting things happening in the internet commercials space. A search for "commercial" on YouTube yields these interesting top-ranked results (YouTube doesn't give a true 'sort by views', which sucks - a topic for another day):
- Conan O'Brien's fake iPhone commercial: 3 million+ views**
- Apple's 1984 commercial: 550,000+ views**
- Rolling Rock Beer Ape commercial: 1,212,096 views
- Chevy HHR Super Bowl commercial: 256,645 views
- Flea Market Montgomery - worst commercial ever: 479,582 views
** exact number of views are undetermined because of the number of times duplicate files has uploaded.
Note how the last link, the "worst commercial ever", has more views than the citizen ad for the Chevy HHR which aired during the Super Bowl. This shows how sometimes, a well-orchestrated train-wreck can get you close to 500,000 views! Compare that to the classic Ridley Scott-directed 1984 Apple SuperBowl commercial.
Parody commercials, whether done by citizens, or TV networks, have also done spectacularly - note the number of views for Conan's fake iPhone ad. And see how some companies, like Rolling Rock, are creating a little positive controversy by saying that they pulled their ad off TV because of complaints. What a great way to save money on airtime, get free PR, and take advantage of free bandwidth at YouTube!
It's all a question of whether you want good attention or bad attention.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Church of the Customer has been talking about "citizen marketing" for over a year. Their new book is called "Citizen Marketers" too so I'm not sure Jon Fine can be credited with coining the term.
Jim, right on both accounts. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba's book, "Citizen Marketers - When People Are the Message" is sitting right on the bookshelf in front of me, staring me in the face. Obviously I haven't gotten around to reading yet - it's next on my list now!
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