Marketers environment
has changed. It is now a
consumer controlled environment. The markets are
such that, either the marketers can fight with the crowd or can have a
two-way communication with them. Along with the rapid growth of
the online social media, podcasting, blogging and social networking
the concept of User Generated Commercials (UGC) has
assumed prominence. This has become a buzzword and new form of
word-of-mouth communication. Digital marketing has provided
the platform for UGC. There are different Internet sites
like `YouTube' and `MySpace' and Internet forums like Flickr,
Yahoo video and Wikipedia which empower the users to share
their ideas and creativity. Firefox, a web browser, ran a campaign
`Firefox Flicks' where it asked its users to make a 30 seconds ad. There
were 280 submissions for this campaign and the winner was a teenage
girl. There are also many television channels running programs like
the V-Cam programs where users get $1,000 for creating ads. Sony
was the first to run such programs followed by Toyota and
L'Oreal. Conn Fishburn, Director of Social Media Strategy for Yahoo
opined that "There should not be ways to market to users but there should
be ways to communicate to them."
Advertising was called the folklore of the industrial society
in 1950s. Advertising then encompassed only dissemination
of messages and stories to the masses. But today, customers are ready
to give their inputs to the company and even the companies are ready
to accept these inputs. For example, MasterCard in its
`Priceless' campaign enthused its customers to make an ad ending with the
word priceless on its consumer generated ads sites. This campaign got a
good response. |
