Commentary

Consumer-Generated Ad Dislike: Age or Execution?

  • by , Featured Contributor, December 7, 2006
Late last week, Heather Green of BusinessWeek Online's Blogspotting had a great post about a recent survey conducted by the American Marketing Association on how consumers feel about consumer-generated ads. The AMA's survey compared how people felt about advertising from companies that used only professional advertising creative to those that included consumer-generated creative.

The AMA's reports highlighted two key findings from the research. The first finding was quite logical: "Consumers believe companies who use customer-created advertising are more creative, customer-friendly and innovative than companies that use only professionally created advertising." It makes sense to me, but having your customers create ads is not the way that most U.S. consumer companies operate. Clearly, allowing customers to be part of the advertising creative process is a way to generate an image with consumers of creativity and friendliness. But not with all consumers, it turns out.

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It seems that younger adults, those under 25, believe that companies that use customer-created advertising are less trustworthy, less socially responsible, and less friendly than companies that use professional advertising. In other words, when companies use consumer-generated advertising, folks 25 and over think that they are creative and friendly, while folks under 25 think that they are trying to pull one over on them.

Wow! Does this mean simply that young people are cynical when it comes to customer-created ads, and old folks just plain gullible? Is it all just about age? I don't think so. I've seen at least 20 different "consumer-generated" ad implementations over the last year or so, and only a minority of them pulled it off. Most looked like they were the results of patchwork compromises entered into around a big conference table.

I think that the disparity of reactions between young and old consumers is much more about execution than it is about age. We have all seen too many contrived "consumer-generated" ad campaigns, where there were almost no true "consumers" involved, and most of the submissions came from the agency themselves or their free-lancers. Or, where Web tools were offered to consumers to create "cool" mash-up ads by mixing images and music and taglines, but they were only given two songs, three backgrounds, and four images to work with. And, once they had submitted their ads, it took three days for them to be posted. This "consumer-generated" approach may have fooled the client, and apparently is fooling folks who only read their e-mail once it has been printed out, but doesn't fool the under-25 crowd, the "Net natives."

To me, what this research says is that the concept and strategy of using consumer-created advertising to get closer to consumers can work, but many of today's techniques and tools to make that happen don't work. Instead of providing creative consumers with all of the options necessary to let their imaginations run free, we are walling them into boxes. The result is CGM ads that turn off younger consumers who know fake "authenticity" when they see it.

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