A warm and fuzzy sense of agreement all round. You’ve synthesised what my thoughts were far more effectively. I certainly don’t believe that UGC should be edited or stopped but am pointing out that the truly valuable stuff can only really fulfil its potential when somebody comes in to curate it.
One point though: You use the case of Doritos at the Superbowl which is a really good example of a big brand getting it right. I think this proves my point. The use of airtime was a competition that allowed the funniest and most entertaining content to rise to the top of the pile and then get displayed in front of a mega audience. In effect Doritos became the curator, a great role for them bringing funny stuff to the public and a great opportunity for ordinary folk to showcase something special.
Forgive me for being a cynic but to work for the brand this had to be curated. If the project was a truly open forum and someone had created a four minute montage of themselves eating 100,000 bags of Doritos over a year and becoming grossly obese as a result, would the brand have used it?
I suppose the crux of my point is that UGC is an incredibly empowering thing that gives us all a voice. This is unquestionably a good thing but for me it’s a matter of whether we use that voice to say something truly worthwhile and interesting or not. If we do then surely getting someone to pick it out of the mire can only be a good thing.
6.11.07
Gloves off - Loser Generated Content
Annoyingly the blog doesn't want me to leave a comment for your post Loser Generated Content James, so i'm just putting my response in another post instead.
If I’ve understood correctly you make two main points.
Firstly, that there’s a plethora of self indulgent UGC out there and because the web is an open arena there’s no quality control over what’s posted, meaning the quality of the content is often in question.
Secondly, too much choice can be a bad thing for us humans but content curation could be our saviour.
I’d love to add a third (tongue I cheek mind!) which others may have already realised and it’s that this is your first post, the first chance for us to read your own content.
I see things slightly differently; I think if there is any quality control over UGC then it will lose the very rawness that makes it so engaging and viral in nature. In the way that a narrow creative proposition will limit a creative mind, the breadth and scope offered by the web gives us wealth of creativity previously undreamt of. The brilliance of it is that you get the unexpected.
I think for brands and marketers UGC is a wonderful thing, especially if budgets are small and the resultant PR can provide much needed hype. It provides us with huge opportunities for consumer insight and of course it enables consumers to create their own content for brands of their choice. Doritos certainly caused a PR stir when they pitched airtime to consumers during the Superbowl whilst Cadillac and M&M’s amongst many others have also engineered campaigns that aimed to get consumers more involved. Maybe one of the newest examples of this is for ipod touch, for which Apple found a fan commercial created by the 18yr old student Nick Haley posted on You Tube. Apple’s marketing team got their creative agency to contact Nick to ask about working with him to use the content they’d found. This really gets to the nub of what we do; the point of ads is to talk to the user, and what better way is there to do this than get the user to talk to the user.
I could agree with you when it comes to sites and brands choosing what UGC to use themselves; they do have to ensure they pick content that’s the right TOV for their brand, carries the right message, engages with their audience and generates enough of the right kind of chat, as of course the content generator will always be generating content elsewhere. And I’m into the idea of curated consumption if it works for a particular brand or site (or even my own browsing habits) as long as it doesn’t put a rein on creativity elsewhere.
Being vegetarian choice cuts of meats don’t really do it for me, I’m more into lush, green vegetation so perhaps it’s only natural that I lean towards thinking the more raw UGC there is out there, the better.
If I’ve understood correctly you make two main points.
Firstly, that there’s a plethora of self indulgent UGC out there and because the web is an open arena there’s no quality control over what’s posted, meaning the quality of the content is often in question.
Secondly, too much choice can be a bad thing for us humans but content curation could be our saviour.
I’d love to add a third (tongue I cheek mind!) which others may have already realised and it’s that this is your first post, the first chance for us to read your own content.
I see things slightly differently; I think if there is any quality control over UGC then it will lose the very rawness that makes it so engaging and viral in nature. In the way that a narrow creative proposition will limit a creative mind, the breadth and scope offered by the web gives us wealth of creativity previously undreamt of. The brilliance of it is that you get the unexpected.
I think for brands and marketers UGC is a wonderful thing, especially if budgets are small and the resultant PR can provide much needed hype. It provides us with huge opportunities for consumer insight and of course it enables consumers to create their own content for brands of their choice. Doritos certainly caused a PR stir when they pitched airtime to consumers during the Superbowl whilst Cadillac and M&M’s amongst many others have also engineered campaigns that aimed to get consumers more involved. Maybe one of the newest examples of this is for ipod touch, for which Apple found a fan commercial created by the 18yr old student Nick Haley posted on You Tube. Apple’s marketing team got their creative agency to contact Nick to ask about working with him to use the content they’d found. This really gets to the nub of what we do; the point of ads is to talk to the user, and what better way is there to do this than get the user to talk to the user.
I could agree with you when it comes to sites and brands choosing what UGC to use themselves; they do have to ensure they pick content that’s the right TOV for their brand, carries the right message, engages with their audience and generates enough of the right kind of chat, as of course the content generator will always be generating content elsewhere. And I’m into the idea of curated consumption if it works for a particular brand or site (or even my own browsing habits) as long as it doesn’t put a rein on creativity elsewhere.
Being vegetarian choice cuts of meats don’t really do it for me, I’m more into lush, green vegetation so perhaps it’s only natural that I lean towards thinking the more raw UGC there is out there, the better.
24.10.07
BIOLOGY LESSON
Ofcom. Office of Communications. Asleep yet? Well don’t drop off. Because if you do (and ordinarily I wouldn’t blame you) interesting marketing publications will pass you by.
It has a thrilling title: “Communications – The Next Decade: A collection of essays prepared for the UK Office of Communications”. Wake Up at the back! One of the essays is by John Naughton. He’s the guy you may have come across doing a technology column in The Observer, normally having a pop at Microsoft. However, here he really spreads his wings.
Here’s the précis of his argument: “Media is the plural of medium, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth…. In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. … An organism depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop…. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium and you change the organism. “
What Naughton proposes is a new communication discipline – “media ecology”. That is to say media as environments.
I think this s a great challenge to both media agencies and creative agencies alike. Being media neutral goes from being sooooo de rigueur to soooo wrong. There is nothing neutral about media. Media must be “connected” to ensure that brand thrive and survive.
18.10.07
loser generated content
I’ve been musing lately on user generated content and I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with most of it is that it’s content generated by users. I’ll finish the post by sort of disagreeing with myself on how important it is but for the time being let’s define terms to help explain why I’d make such a facetious statement.
First of all ‘user’. It’s a term totally lacking in distinction, there’s no qualification or specificity about it. A user doesn’t necessarily have any experience, academic or otherwise, that qualifies a statement or judgement they might make. What they say could be nothing more than a piece of self-indulgent expression or just plain malice.
Secondly ‘generated’ and ‘content’. Hmmmm, it gives me a sense of something spewed out by the megawatt or the furlong. Like the apocryphal story of the Waterstones customer asking for three yards of green leather books for a study he was having fitted. It’s not user crafted or user forged content for a good reason. One of the key problems is the sheer ease involved in making it.
The best example of this is in music. It’s now officially harder to get signed as a band on My Space than it ever was before My Space existed. Any half-baked shoe gazer can record and upload their oeuvre along with a couple of photos of their biro ‘luv’ and ‘hat’ knuckle tattoos. At least in the old days the effort required to make a demo tape filtered out some of the chaff.
This might sound like the sort of rant more at home in the Daily Mail or the letters page of the Telegraph but stick with me. To my mind this has actually been a critically important process. The explosion in UGC across the spectrum has actually stimulated a new and more intelligent breed of organisations that can help us filter. According to a recent article in the New Scientist, humans can only really cope with a choice of six options and riding in over the hill have come the white knights of content curation to save us. I include in this posse the sophisticated algorithms that sit at the heart of every price comparison site (how long before somebody does a comparison site comparison site?) and coolhunter/trendwatcher sites that bring together the best in retail or fashion.
So far so simple. (I’m not pretending this is bleeding edge thinking) It’s very much a case of the pendulum swinging away and then coming back again. We’ve rejected what we knew in favour of more choice, we’ve been given that choice and now we want somebody to take it away again and give us the six choices that allow us to feel empowered but not overwhelmed.
You might think that we’re destined to suffer the vagaries of this pendulum interminably but there’s a happy medium. If you’ll forgive the media wankery, I think we can safely call this web 2.5. (why 2.5 and not 3.0? – there’ll probably be another instalment on that shortly) Organisations, and I suppose more specifically sites, can and should do both.
This is where the immediate future for UGC lies. Sites that offer the choice of classic UGC with its double headed hydra of flimsiness and credibility, which people are beginning to view with the appropriate degree of caution and cynicism, coupled with more authoritative, trustworthy content managed by people with the right credentials.
The really clever bit is linking the two. The best sites will give the users the subject, motivation and forum to generate a meat market of their own content and will then feed their authoritative content beast with choice cuts from the result.
First of all ‘user’. It’s a term totally lacking in distinction, there’s no qualification or specificity about it. A user doesn’t necessarily have any experience, academic or otherwise, that qualifies a statement or judgement they might make. What they say could be nothing more than a piece of self-indulgent expression or just plain malice.
Secondly ‘generated’ and ‘content’. Hmmmm, it gives me a sense of something spewed out by the megawatt or the furlong. Like the apocryphal story of the Waterstones customer asking for three yards of green leather books for a study he was having fitted. It’s not user crafted or user forged content for a good reason. One of the key problems is the sheer ease involved in making it.
The best example of this is in music. It’s now officially harder to get signed as a band on My Space than it ever was before My Space existed. Any half-baked shoe gazer can record and upload their oeuvre along with a couple of photos of their biro ‘luv’ and ‘hat’ knuckle tattoos. At least in the old days the effort required to make a demo tape filtered out some of the chaff.
This might sound like the sort of rant more at home in the Daily Mail or the letters page of the Telegraph but stick with me. To my mind this has actually been a critically important process. The explosion in UGC across the spectrum has actually stimulated a new and more intelligent breed of organisations that can help us filter. According to a recent article in the New Scientist, humans can only really cope with a choice of six options and riding in over the hill have come the white knights of content curation to save us. I include in this posse the sophisticated algorithms that sit at the heart of every price comparison site (how long before somebody does a comparison site comparison site?) and coolhunter/trendwatcher sites that bring together the best in retail or fashion.
So far so simple. (I’m not pretending this is bleeding edge thinking) It’s very much a case of the pendulum swinging away and then coming back again. We’ve rejected what we knew in favour of more choice, we’ve been given that choice and now we want somebody to take it away again and give us the six choices that allow us to feel empowered but not overwhelmed.
You might think that we’re destined to suffer the vagaries of this pendulum interminably but there’s a happy medium. If you’ll forgive the media wankery, I think we can safely call this web 2.5. (why 2.5 and not 3.0? – there’ll probably be another instalment on that shortly) Organisations, and I suppose more specifically sites, can and should do both.
This is where the immediate future for UGC lies. Sites that offer the choice of classic UGC with its double headed hydra of flimsiness and credibility, which people are beginning to view with the appropriate degree of caution and cynicism, coupled with more authoritative, trustworthy content managed by people with the right credentials.
The really clever bit is linking the two. The best sites will give the users the subject, motivation and forum to generate a meat market of their own content and will then feed their authoritative content beast with choice cuts from the result.
30.9.07
Scaredy cats rock
Even now I am amazed at how some agencies won’t allow an agency blog.I think it’s because they’re afraid. They fear the outside world and what it might say to them and about them, and let’s just get it out there, they fear what their own employees will write.
How last season! And how downright weird when they work in communications.
I’ve also been struck by the fear some people seem to have of blogging. I tested it recently and this still, panicky look comes over people’s face and they say, ‘Write a blog? Me? Why? Who’s going to want to read what I’ve written?’ or they say, ‘No way - I don’t have time to do that.’ Fair do’s. But you talk to people you meet and share your thoughts with them pretty much most days so this is just another way of chatting, you just get more time to structure your thoughts.
So as you may have guessed this week my obsession is fear. I read this brilliant article (I thought it was brilliant because it resonated with me for a number of reasons) yesterday on adage.com by this guy called Peter Murane, entitled ‘Act small to win big with killer ideas’. It relates to CPG companies (and I’m sure this can be true of any big company in any sector) and how the culture of these big companies and their employees’ fear of missing targets, can inhibit innovation and NPD. Shouldn’t fear be recognised as one of the primary drivers of innovation? Shouldn’t we learn to love fear and embrace it?
19.9.07
in the beginning....
This is our first posting.
And it doesn’t take a rocket inventor to point out the inherent irony of a blog entitled innovationiseverything being launched now, this late in the day.
Well we would argue this is to misunderstand the true nature of innovation. Innovation is, in fact, much more of a happy bed fellow with the principals of Kaizen, or continuous improvement to established practices. Innovation is, much more usefully, really another name for creative ideas.
So our blogging journey starts off with humble but important objectives. Not to claim reinvention of the wheel, but to make the wheel more interesting, fun and if possible useful.
On the subject of humble, one of the things about blogs which really appealed to us was that the fact that they are both transient and permanent at one and the same time. We love the fact that the time that blogs are posted is indelibly recorded to the minute for posterity. A still frame from a frenzied day. An image grab of what seemed funny or vital at one particular slice in time. And of course given the democracy of the media, the very act of capturing it, frees and liberates it, launching it out in an independent life in something called blogoshpere.
Innovationiseverything is a forum for the folk working at My Agency, a collection of creative minded people working in London. Artists, songwriters, even humble advertising creatives have for years carried with them little journals of scraps, of homeless ideas, of skunk works. Pieces to which they return at a later date. Pieces which are often the origins of something bigger, more complete. In the same way we hope that innovationiseverything becomes that for the people at My Agency and anyone else who happens to stumble across us. Use and enjoy.
And it doesn’t take a rocket inventor to point out the inherent irony of a blog entitled innovationiseverything being launched now, this late in the day.
Well we would argue this is to misunderstand the true nature of innovation. Innovation is, in fact, much more of a happy bed fellow with the principals of Kaizen, or continuous improvement to established practices. Innovation is, much more usefully, really another name for creative ideas.
So our blogging journey starts off with humble but important objectives. Not to claim reinvention of the wheel, but to make the wheel more interesting, fun and if possible useful.
On the subject of humble, one of the things about blogs which really appealed to us was that the fact that they are both transient and permanent at one and the same time. We love the fact that the time that blogs are posted is indelibly recorded to the minute for posterity. A still frame from a frenzied day. An image grab of what seemed funny or vital at one particular slice in time. And of course given the democracy of the media, the very act of capturing it, frees and liberates it, launching it out in an independent life in something called blogoshpere.
Innovationiseverything is a forum for the folk working at My Agency, a collection of creative minded people working in London. Artists, songwriters, even humble advertising creatives have for years carried with them little journals of scraps, of homeless ideas, of skunk works. Pieces to which they return at a later date. Pieces which are often the origins of something bigger, more complete. In the same way we hope that innovationiseverything becomes that for the people at My Agency and anyone else who happens to stumble across us. Use and enjoy.
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