A few more thoughts on yesterday’s post about User Generated Content. Having thrown myself into UGC at Sky for two years, I’m inevitably an advocate of its benefits for brands.
Thing is, I think people don’t quite understand what “User Generated” actually means. User “created” perhaps is a better description because it’s original material created by the user rather than film clips, music videos or something they’ve ripped from TV. Just because a user has uploaded some content it doesn’t mean they necessarily created it. What’s more, TV shows, films, music, etc enjoy copyright and other protections — so if a user uploads something like this to the Internet they could be breaking the rules and run into big trouble.
To me, user generated should mean user created not user uploaded. The opportunity is to engage people in the user created area.
The competition Doritos ran around the 2007 Superbowl sticks out as a prime example of how to do it — they asked people to create an advert which they would ultimately broadcast during the game:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YJbbA_4TfQ&hl=en&fs=1]
At £1m plus for 30 secs of airtime, that’s quite a commitment to user contributions.
User or loser: part 2394 « Don’t Go Mad
11/14/2008 at 10:02
[...] or loser: part 2394 More about whether user generated content is loser generated, and my thoughts about user created versus user uploaded. The following video comes from The [...]