• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 8, 2006

The rapid rise in user-generated content has created a new way for marketers to reach consumers, ironically via media created by consumers themselves. Now it is spawning a new way for advertisers to generate the kind of content they use to communicate with consumers: advertising. In an announcement scheduled to be made later today, a new player will unveil an ambitious plan to tap consumers to create ads for both online and traditional media outlets, displacing the role of traditional advertising agencies.

While a grass roots movement toward consumer-generated ads has emerged over the past couple of years via individual consumers and marketers, the effort seeks to provide some structure for the process, giving marketers a place to interact with consumers, provide them with specs for creating their own ads, and sophisticated tools for reviewing, editing, approving and activating consumer-generated ad campaigns.

"We're just taking advantage of a couple of trends that are already underway: The explosive growth of video on the Internet; the growth in social networks; and the growth of consumers wanting to participate with brands," says Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue Inc., which has acquired online video sharing community Sharkle.com, which will become the base of the new consumer ad creation system. "What we want to do is enable consumers to do what they are already doing - creating advertising - but to do it in a credible way and with some scale that is meaningful for marketers."

In fact, ViTrue has quietly already been doing that behind the scenes for several big marketers, including Sony Pictures, which created a consumer-generated ad campaign for its popular movie, "The Benchwarmers."

The campaign, dubbed "The Nerd Leagued," can be viewed at www.nerdleague.net, and features content Sony created to promote the film by interacting with fans of the film. ViTrue's push is part of a new progression of interacting with consumers in the creation of advertising messages, and brings a new formal structure to what some consumers and marketers have already been doing. He cites the www.conversegallery.com, a site created by athletic shoe marketer Converse to generate ads.

What makes ViTrue's platform different, he says, is that it provides marketers with standardized tools for doing that on a larger scale.

At the core of that system are "review and approve" modules that allow marketers to post specifications for ad campaigns and to enable the marketer, or its agency to quickly review ads and post them on-the-fly.

Initially, ViTrue will make those ads available via Sharkle.com, on a marketer's or a brand's own site, or through viral distribution online. But Bradford says the company already is working on taking those ads offline and embedding them in traditional media, including TV.

One of those efforts involves a summer-long campaign that will be announced by a major packaged goods marketer in the next two weeks, which will involve ads created by consumers online, which will "bounce back to the traditional media," says Bradford.

"Right now, we're talking mainly about TV and radio, but we see the potential to take this into other media too," he adds, saying the company already envisions using the Internet to create ad slicks for magazines and newspapers.

But the bulk of ViTrue's efforts will focus on video, he says, because of the rapid growth of the online video sharing community, which he says could transform billion dollar ad categories, especially consumer electronics and youth-oriented products.

ViTrue is not alone. Other user-generated ad sites have emerged such as AdCandy.com, but they have generally been grassroots efforts by enthusiasts themselves, while ViTrue is designed as a tool for marketers.

Bradford concedes that initial conversations with agencies have been rocky, but that the "more forward-looking" shops understand the value of consumer-generated advertising, and are trying to understand the role companies like ViTrue can play in that process.

"The genie is out of the bottle," he says. "Consumer-generated video is here to state. We're just trying to give marketers and agencies a way of taking advantage of it."