In the ongoing courtship of the consumer, brands are inviting them in to the creative process; and consumers, increasingly tech savvy, and with reality TV stardust in their eyes, are willingly accepting the invitation.
‘The majority of consumers within the under-30 sweet spot have created and posted their own content on the web, or via mobile devices,’ says Tony Chapman, CEO of Toronto-based promotional agency Capital C. ‘[In the past] we were passive viewers – we simply digested what people fed us. Overnight we have become creators, publishers, ranters and storytellers.’ And that’s redefining how advertisers and consumers relate. Gone are the times when a Great Oz divide separated the two. Today’s advertiser wants to engage, entertain, and ultimately, ensure brand loyalty.
A recent example: work by Chapman’s agency for hair care line, Sunsilk. Last month the brand purchased an entire weekend of advertising time on youth network MuchMusic. It was called the Wig Out weekend, a marathon of Sunsilk-sponsored content devoted to bad hair problems with solutions courtesy of Sunsilk. The station invited viewers to send footage of their wildest hair meltdowns (known as wigging out.) The best ones were woven into the weekend’s ad content. Viewers voted on the station’s website to determine which submission merited a $10,000 prize.
‘Our target is not paying attention,’ says Chapman to explain the imaginative execution for the brand. ‘They have too little time, too many media options, and filters like TiVo. Attention is the oxygen of brand building. Marketers need to uncover new ways to get the consumer’s attention.’
And that now means offering them a sense of brand ownership by letting them create ads, then giving their work a spotlight.
Hellmann’s mayonnaise tapped into the trend with an older demographic for a campaign it launched last year. Its tagline was to the point – ‘Be famous for your food.’ Consumers were invited to shoot their own commercials featuring their favourite Hellmann’s recipe. Canadians responded with hundreds of submissions received from the mainly female demo. The work by the brand’s former agency, Toronto’s Zig, which features the faces and names of average Canadians, was also developed into print and in-store executions.
But the best-known – and most buzz-generating – demonstration of this trend was the consumer-created ad for Frito-Lay brand Doritos which hit the airwaves in February during one of the biggest TV events of the year – the Super Bowl. With its mammoth viewing audience and the reams of media coverage that followed, it was an announcement of mainstream brand acceptance of the trend.
But some question whether it has staying power.
‘My initial reaction is that what we’re staring at is evidence that consumers enjoy the concept of a dialogue, but is this the best expression of it – they make the ads? I don’t know, but I doubt it,’ says Philippe Garneau, creative director at Toronto’s GWP Brand Engineering, which counts ING Direct and Buckley’s cough syrup as clients. ‘In bringing in the [consumer by saying]: ‘We’ll put your ad on the Super Bowl,’ what you’re looking at is a very smart marketing ploy, but you’re not looking at, in my view, a long-term proposition.’
As for it being a way to gain insight into the consumer? ‘I’ve seen no evidence that they’re sending ads as cautionary notes or ways to tell you what they think you should be doing,’ he says. ‘I think they’re just trying to impress you and win the contest. Period.’
Some agencies are already having a bit of fun with the trend. In its multimedia campaign for ‘budget’ beer James Ready, from Moosehead Breweries, ad agency Leo Burnett Canada asks consumers for marketing assistance; as the regional brewery is without the big beer budgets of its competitors, consumers have to create their own marketing paraphernalia, including coasters, T-shirts and the like.
There is merit to the consumer-advertiser dialogue, says David Moore, Leo Burnett Canada president/CEO, but the trend should be used sparingly.
‘The task of managing a brand in all of its facets is never going to be left up to some random person with a webcam on a Saturday afternoon,’ he says. ‘[Marketers] still need to sell products and services; consumer perception still has to be addressed. I see it as a component of any brand…to hopefully let consumers engage. But I think it will just be one communication channel in a brand’s roadmap.’
From YouTube to mass media glory
In mid-January, a six-minute video of a hysterical bride-to-be shearing her locks moments before her wedding hit YouTube. It was grainy, badly shot and even included the smirking friend who couldn’t get enough of the meltdown.
By Feb. 1, it had over two million views, but was it real or faux? At the time, no one knew. Turns out it was an effort to plant the term ‘wig out’ (used several times in the skit) into the public psyche to launch Sunsilk – much like the Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert did with ‘truthiness.’
”Wig Out’ was never an ad,’ says Capital C’s CEO Tony Chapman of the creative coup. ‘It was an insight into how the Sunsilk target [the twentysomething female] reacts to bad hair. Bennett Klein, a partner at the agency, felt that this insight wasn’t ready for prime time [television] – if we jammed a brand onto it and made it advertising, it wouldn’t get noticed.’
We noticed. The seeding hit the national TV media circuit big time and was even ‘flattered’ in a wedding wig-out scene in the U.S. sitcom, How I Met Your Mother.
