Unfiltered User-Generated Content? I will bury you.

A note to all the Creative Directors and Brand Managers out there working on brands I compete with on a daily basis: put an unfiltered user-generated content campaign into the marketplace and I will slit your brand’s throat, tear its tongue out by its roots and bury its body somewhere near the sea. Crabs will dine on it at their leisure.

Several marketing consultants and more than a few consultant-bloggers have spent the last few months salivating over this, their latest conceptual buzzword. My experience with consultants is they tend to have Pavlovian responses at the sound of freshly-minted coins jingle-jangle-jingling in their pockets, and user-generated content– and the promise of guiding marketers, sherpa-like, to the top of the user-generated mountain– offers them their latest, greatest opportunity for collecting book writing, consulting and keynote speaking fees.

I have no problem with that; I’d never begrudge someone an honest livelihood, much less a lucrative one, but woe unto you if your consulting efforts lead to a fiasco such as the one unfolding with the Chevy Tahoe brand.

David Burn over at AdPulp is right: implementing this unfiltered user-generated campaign was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Let’s say I, as a hypothetical Ford Bronco marketing manager, caught wind of Chevy’s campaign. What would I do? The first thing would be to phone my P.R. agency and direct them to spread the word to activist groups willing to take a shot or two at creating their own, very special version of user-generated content. I’d make sure the results of their labor was placed somewhere on permanent display and then engage a horde of eager bloggers willing (quite, thank you very much!) to go forth and spread the good news.

Voilà!– death by a million tiny cuts.

Does it matter that my hypothetical brand could easily be painted with the same scarlet brush? Not in the least. The competing brand was tarred and feathered, completely and irrevocably (under the official stamp of the brand itself no less!) and I’d get as much mileage out of it as I could, even if it was only four miles to the gallon.

I would win, they would lose. Steve over at AdRants is quoted in a New York Times article and on his site as saying, “We think there are some voices inside G.M. that understand social media very well and knew this would happen.” That may be true. If so, they understand social media but they’ve forgotten everything they ever learned about protecting their brand.

The brand is their baby and trying to nurture it with an unfiltered user-generated campaign is to feed it a yummy-looking idea with a lead spoon.

Good luck with that. Hope the grandkids have all their fingers and toes.

Unfiltered user-generated content is death and filtered user-generated is simply a new buzzword-approved name for what marketers have done for years and years– allow consumers to submit their ideas for the brand (just look at the kid-submitted jokes on Laffy Taffy wrappers as only one example among many). Once upon a time, before the consultants got involved, these promotional efforts were called contests.

But if you’re a brand I compete with, please, go ahead and put an unfiltered user-generated campaign out there. I beg of you. Please.

I’m a competitive person and I can be a rough-and-tumble sonofabitch when called on to act, so this shot across the bow goes out to all you decision makers out there in ad land crafting and approving the next Big Campaign. Use unfiltered user-generated content at your peril.

Ad Monkeys like me are legion.

5 commentsEmail Article Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 09:42am Mack Simpson

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