Lessons In Consumer-Generated Media

Brands with a future take risks. Giving consumers your brand platform -- for them to play with -- is the risk du jour. More and more companies are launching contests that ask consumers to generate commercials -- just like Madison Avenue makes (or so they hope!). Most participants love the challenge, while others crave the incentives. The standard issue prize package includes cash, air time and the fame that accompanies both. And a classic consumer ad contest in the making is from Heinz.

Electronic Retailer: October 1, 2007
By Timothy R. Hawthorne

Ask the Expert: New Media

Q: What lessons in consumer-generated media can be learned from ketchup?

A: Brands with a future take risks. Giving consumers your brand platform -- for them to play with -- is the risk du jour. More and more companies are launching contests that ask consumers to generate commercials -- just like Madison Avenue makes (or so they hope!). Most participants love the challenge, while others crave the incentives. The standard issue prize package includes cash, air time and the fame that accompanies both. And a classic consumer ad contest in the making is from Heinz.

Learning 2.0 web marketing is like learning a foreign language. When you step into a collegiate German class, English is completely verboten. To gain true proficiency you must immerse yourself fully. Taking my seat in the Web 2.0 classroom -- before my computer, of course -- I decided to study Heinz Ketchup's wildly popular "Top This" contest (www.topthistv.com) I vowed to view at least 57 entries (3989 entries in all) and not get up until finished. I watched dozens of randomly-picked entries as well as 15 that Heinz nominated as finalists. I learned quite a lot -- some of it surprising, some of it not. And a few pertinent lessons that all Direct Marketers will find valuable.

The first thing my viewing confirmed is how much talent and value a brand's customers bring. Hundreds of these 30-second entries are inventive, on message and carefully crafted. But even the best and brightest contain seemingly small flaws that could seriously scuttle their impact. My view-a-thon reminded me just how many elements good creatives must blend -- and how many places a sound concept can sour.

FORGETTING FUNDAMENTALS ...

Amateurs make amateur mistakes. While we judge mistakes somewhat subjectively, creative formulas exist for a reason. Some lines you simply can't cross. When amateur auteurs get rolling, some just can't stop. The most glaring CGM (consumer generated media) gaffes attach negative connotations to the product they're pitching. With ketchup, the most inevitable is subbing in Heinz for large troughs of blood -- from bloody prank-playing children to knight-errant Legos dueling to their deaths in a ketchup pool. More unsettling is the technically impressive spot that features an animated tomato facing off with a rotating saw blade. The motto? "Good tomatoes, killer ketchup." Well, it would complement that Jack The Ripper Cheeseburger, I guess.

Freed from agency and client review (though Heinz reportedly rejected roughly half of 8000 submissions), first-time marketers are less inhibited than experienced pros. The contrast appears sharply in an entry that features a bird relieving itself on a hot dog. The oblivious grillmaster doesn't notice, squirts on the Heinz and bites in. The ketchup is apparently so good that the dog's initial condiment doesn't register. Well, not on the actor, perhaps.

Equally problematic is when ketchup is the tool of undesirable behavior. A young man wipes ketchup on walls (too real and a bear to clean up). A woman consumes ketchup while careening around in a van she can barely control (too real and a societal menace). These are not the associations that brand owners covet. Another submission concludes with a 20-something slugging his nebbishy friend who abuses Heinz ketchup somehow. Belting defenseless goofballs is presumably peachy.

The second most common misstep is to focus myopically on images, gags and conceits ... and completely lose sight of the product. For a contest with "Heinz Ketchup" splattered everywhere, it's shocking how often the brand pops up like an afterthought. Particularly grating are the condiment-free monologues. (Look pal, I wouldn't date you either -- ketchup won't help.) Although comedy is tricky, everyone thinks they're the next Will Ferrell. An awful lot of entries work awfully hard to be funny -- then plug in the ketchup with three seconds left. Even one of the 15 finalists forgets to keep he product out front. A rap plays simultaneously in each of four windows that divide up the screen. It's technically solid and the rapper's convincing, but there could sure be a lot more about Heinz. But too much entertainment and not enough product is a classic Mad Men mistake - at least from the DRTV catbird seat.

When the user-generated ads do remember to shine the light on the brand, they often forget about benefits. A historical montage adds Heinz to famous Americans' portraits, but where is the sales message in this bottle? A different clip's cartoon-like container dons board shorts to hang on a surfboard. It's certainly front and center, but why would you buy? Another finalist animates an army of little ketchup packets that rise up to assist the big bottle in its battle against mustard and mayo. It's brilliantly clever and very well made, but my inner direct marketer would still like to know if it tastes good.

... AND NOT KNOWING SUBTLETIES

Perhaps the greatest differentiator between user-generated ads and those done commercially is the latter's mastery of nuance. Hundreds of promising consumer clips do themselves in by mishandling a critical detail. An entry that spotlights Heinz's notoriously slow pouring depicts three ways to speed up the process. Because two of them fail before the last one succeeds, the video maker unwittingly attributes a two-to-one failure rate to the product it means to promote. Unintended negativity trips a lot of contestants. Consider the entry where a man uses a ShopVac and plunger to attempt his ketchup extraction. It's pretty amusing until its smashing conclusion: a hammer bashes the bottle to bits, leaving an unusable pile of ketchupy shrapnel. Not what I want at my dinner table!

Sequencing and timing are particularly troublesome techniques. In a spot that features a toddler who refuses her dinner, a Heinz dollop reins in the caterwauling. Then the voiceover starts: "Sometimes ... you just have to eat it." The line refers to the unwanted pre-ketchup presentation, but as the words launch with the ketchup's appearance, it's the Heinz that sounds disagreeable. One second too late in timing and the whole meaning changes. Another contestant films a Chinese dish that the talent covers with Heinz. After a ketchup-topped bite, he leaps up and runs off. It later turns out that he wanted a big spoon to gobble his meal faster, but the sequence implies that he's fleeing the ketchup -- the opposite of what he intended.

An obvious area where amateurs lag behind agencies is the quality of their hardware and software. Contestants do pretty amazing things with consumer electronics, but their setups can't compete with a fully outfitted studio. No amount of Heinz Ketchup can rescue a pale and poorly lit hot dog. Grade-school fonts and crude animations draw attention to the creative process itself, distracting the viewers from the message intended.

Before you take me to task for applying graduate school standards to eleventh grade essays, keep one fact firmly in mind: no television network will discount its rate card because Heinz wants to air its amateur hour commercials. Consumer-generated commercial contests that guarantee air time to the winners demand entries that are scripted down to the second, carefully filmed and painstakingly edited. Advertising professionals may not hold consumers to our own lofty standards, but the viewing public most certainly will.

What CGM contests like Heinz' "Top This TV" have proven over the past year is that Madison Ave. does not have a strangle hold on creativity or the Big Idea. There are hundreds of submitted concepts, though poorly executed, that could have been fervently pitched, with million dollar budget tags attached, by any of the top Brand agencies.

So what's in this advertising trend for the Direct Marketer? Certainly the best CGM commercials (Doritos Superbowl spot, Dove campaign) have been hits for Brand advertisers looking for image and awareness impact, but not bottom line, accountable sales -- the purview of DMers.. Fact is, I'm not sure any DRTV marketer has been brave enough to wade into the Web 2.0 advertising waters, yet. But, can you imagine what kind of commercials "true believing" ProActiv users, with just a bit of production savvy, might create for Guthy Renker? Where Brand advertisers have always been wary and far removed from their customers and now, via CGM, are getting intimate (perhaps overly so), we, as Direct Marketers, traditionally get to know our end users enthusiastically and profoundly, yet have been loathe to include the consumer in "making the message." Who knows what new DRTV formulas might be learned if the Bean, Swivel Sweeper and Magic Bullet fell into the hands of some young, clever consumer creatives? Worth a test...

Timothy R. Hawthorne is chairman and executive creative director of hawthorne direct inc, a full-service DRTV, Print, Mail and Digital ad agency founded in 1986. A 34-year television producer/writer/director, Hawthorne is a cum laude Harvard graduate.