• by Christian Anthony , September 4, 2007

The relationship between user-generated content (UGC) and brands presents both inherent challenges and enormous opportunities for interactive advertising agencies.

UGC allows for brands and consumers to interact directly--outside the reach of the ad agency. However, and crucially, this direct interaction does not undermine the role of the agency. In fact, as brands cede control and embrace interactive marketing, the agency emerges as a critical component of this process. In this new marketing model, the agency can offer clients education, guidance and innovation.

Agencies can work with brands first to establish comfort in embracing the consumer as a brand's chief marketing agent. If they do not already, brands will come to realize that supporting a customer's ability to have a voice online--whether positive or negative--is effective marketing.

Agencies will play a crucial role in guiding clients and consumers through this transition. We can provide research, experience and proven results to ease a brand's launch into the uncertain.

This comes through the creation of new and better forms of interacting, identifying successive phases of UGC, assessing its impact on a client's brand and integrating UGC effectively and appropriately with a brand's message. Clients look to their agencies to navigate these changes.

The creative role of agencies will also remain valuable in this new environment. There will always be instances where the interaction between brands and consumers needs a spark.

In a UGC universe, agencies can and do provide the brand platform, overarching messages and creative elements--then let the consumer take it from there.

User-generated content is ultimately an advanced form of organic marketing where the consumer is also a publisher and a personality with an audience and voice of their own.