Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi.
In response to my last post, commenter Rob weighed in with an interesting question: "Do you think that the evolution of user-produced media (YouTube, Current.tv, etc.) is a positive or negative trend in marketing?" For my part, I don't think of the trend as positive or negative, because the fact is, it's happening. Design, production, and publication tools have been democratized, taken out from behind the wall of professionalism and placed in the hands of the general public. User-generated content is perceived as having integrity, as coming straight from the mind and soul of the consumer. It also has a certain in-your-face charisma-- right now, to express oneself in media that were formerly reserved for professionals feels like rebellion against an elite. It's exciting to see the wall between how products craftily represent themselves and how their target audience actually perceives them knocked down with creativity, wit, and talent.
Think of user-generated media and an identifiable aesthetic comes to mind: low-fi, "reality-style" production values; irreverent, ironic humor; and use of a product in a way the manufacturer didn't intend to make a statement that is in no way tethered to the commercial interests of the product. Just as important as user-generated media is user-transmitted media. It's funny, the hottest word in marketing right now is "viral"- marketers are always trying to figure out how to generate the next piece of commercial media that is going to be picked up and spread like wildfire from one consumer to the next. And yet, while trying to harness it, the trend has also been viewed with some apprehension and even hostility, because it's still an unknown quantity that can't quite be controlled.
Take Coca-Cola's reaction to the widely circulated videos of "Mentos+Diet Coke experiments," where mixing the two causes a volcano effect. Mentos execs were thrilled with the exposure, and the fact that people were using Mentos to create their own statement-- to them it meant that the brand had taken on a life of its own. The video artists responsible, a duo known as Eepybird.com , were actually contacted by Mentos to do a commercial deal with them. Coke's reaction, on the other hand, was frosty at best. They didn't like Coke being promoted in a context where they didn't have direct control over the image being presented. At the time, Coke Spokeswoman Susan McDermott issued a statement that the "craziness with Mentos doesn't fit with the brand personality" of Coke.
Eight months later, Coke, a bit slow on the uptake, had a change of heart--they sponsored an EepyBird Experiment/performance at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, and a video contest judged by Eepybird on the Coke website. Meanwhile, to unveil their new non-caloric drink Coke Zero, they launched a marketing campaign now infamous for its aping of the user-generated aesthetic, including a faux-personal blog, and a series of videos showing Coke Classic executives telling "actual lawyers" that they want to sue Coke Zero for "taste infringement." The entire campaign was distributed in forums such as YouTube and through an email feature on the Coke Zero website inviting you to "sue a friend." The videos were funny and well done, and they captured the mood of (self) mockery, having fun and games at the expense of the befuddled suits at the giant corporation while pretending to be the voice of the independent wise-ass with a video camera. But there were murmurings in the blogosphere of distaste for the poseur aspect of it.
With professional marketers seeking to emulate the same DIY-aesthetic and production values of consumer-generated media, how long before that patina of "realness" starts to erode? Already the web audience is getting more cynical and skeptical, due to cases like the phony personal blogs, the outing of Lonelygirl15, and other commercial entities posing as regular folks. Like any trend, oversaturation may produce a backlash or at least some rebalancing to an aesthetic that is more polished and unabashedly professional. But no matter what develops of the aesthetic, user-generated and transmitted media is certainly here to stay, and it relies on marketing's timeless holy grail: ads that gets consumed as entertainment.
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