Fully Loded

Driving users to your branding campaign is just the beginning. 

I Part I we examined how user-generated media has reversed the chain of events when marketing to your users, evaluating three key ways to utilize a user-generated media campaign. First, engage in branded media partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube to promote campaigns like the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call or with multi-branded promotions like the Zippo Hot Tours. Second, seed your campaigns by creating feeds to podcasting networks, developing branded pages on social networks and providing tools for your users to create their own branded pages or profiles. Finally, we looked at the efficacy of promotions. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, meet the stars or get their 15 minutes of fame — use it to your advantage! 

The outlets to distribute control can create a “brand network” for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience.

Now that you are armed with ways to drive people to your user-generated media campaign, here are two simple creative paths you can take to help you set up your campaign and get going. I like to distinguish them as “free hand” and “color by numbers.”

Free hand
Free hand user-generated media is when marketers provide a blank canvas for consumers to develop original content, as in Comedy Central’s Test Pilots, where viewers are encouraged to enter their own one-to-five-minute pilot episodes that they can submit as videos or storyboards, via “hidden camera” or any other format desired. In such a creative free-for-all, you surrender control to consumers, but in return they market the heck out of your product for you, and spend gobs of time with your brand.

Free hand user-generated media can even be developed without your having asking for it, providing a serendipitous opportunity for you and your audience to interact. The “Saturday Night Live” skit “Lazy Sunday” was downloaded 1.2 million times when it was added to the videos on YouTube and spawned parodies like “Lazy Monday” and, my favorite, “Lazy Muncie,” which started popping up among users’ YouTube creations. This has provided SNL with a great opportunity to create a targeted promotion– when, apparently, it wasn’t even looking to do so! SNL could manipulate this user-generated media in any number of ways, all while stoking the creative fires of a younger audience clearly looking to get involved in the show’s product.

Color by numbers
In the color by numbers scenario, brand marketers are able to better control their brand identities, while still playing in the user-generated media space. Companies provide branded content and allow users to customize portions of it. New Line Cinema’s Wedding Crashers “Crash the Trailer” is a great example of this: the studio provided materials to users and allowed them to personalize it, again with target audiences (and their friends) spending tons of time interacting with a company’s brand.

Utilizing either of these scenarios (or both) to engage your consumers, while taking advantage of the various methods of driving them to your campaign, will help you create a successful user-generated media avalanche as consumers interact with your product to much greater degrees, all while pushing your brand way beyond the limitations of your paid media campaign.

Today’s consumers are eager to be entertained while they’re being marketed to. Further, they want to be a part of creating that entertainment and, in return, they will help market your brand and product for you. So how will you answer their call? As entertainment marketers our answer is simple and hails right out of our own backyard: “Let us entertain you.”

New, more engaging forms of media let audiences work as part of your marketing team.

(originally published May 2006)

Who’s marketing your brand? Your consumers, that’s who. Today’s consumers have more control over when and where and how they will be marketed to. With the recent surge in user-generated media, consumers now participate in what the message looks like, as well as influencing who receives it. So what should entertainment companies like yours do in order to engage these consumers and take advantage of this new marketing tool?

In this first article of the series, we will focus on driving users to your campaign.

In the not-so-old days, taking your message to your audience was simple: entertainment companies created entertaining content, advertising agencies helped market that content and users consumed it. But along comes user-generated media, a hybrid marketing tool that reverses the old, familiar method.

Some companies have embraced this reversal. Warner Home Video, Universal Pictures, Warner Music Group and Comedy Central have all realized the power user-generated media can provide their brands, and have molded their campaigns to take advantage of consumers’ new-found ability to participate. There’s a veritable traffic jam of other like-minded companies trying to figure out how best to incorporate user-generated media into their marketing strategies, entertaining users while getting those same users to help market their products.

If you want to take advantage of this eager-to-be-tapped new source of advertising energy as part of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to provide opportunities for consumer participation, and that means designing plans to drive consumers to a user-generated media campaign. You could do this by integrating the message into your usual campaign media, which can be effective; but savvy marketers are honing in on a few other avenues to create buzz and reach audiences.
 
Take advantage of branded media partnerships
Creating partnerships with companies like iFilm, Revver and YouTube or with the multi-branded promotion like the one run by Zippo Hot Tours has started to emerge as an effective new way to reach the user-generated media target audience. For example, our company, nFusion, recently developed a user-generated media concept for WHV’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” DVD release called the “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Casting Call.” WHV partnered with Revver to support and promote the campaign on their website starting this May.

With statistics like 30 million video streams a day at YouTube, it is clear that inter-media networking can give immediate lift to the audience you seek– and the added media support is a great way to extend your media budget. If you have a product with a limited release and non-blockbuster-scale media budget, this type of partnership could prove a great way to reach millions of enthusiastic users while engaging them with your product.

Seeding a campaign
This is essentially an online PR campaign on steroids, and needs to be a part of every marketer’s efforts. The simplest step is to create feeds of video content to VODcasting sites like iTunes, PodShow and Podcast.net. Developing brand pages on social network sites like MySpace has become standard. Finally, your user-generated media campaign is all about, of course, users generating the content, so provide them with the tools (video, photos, add to MySpace links, etc.) to create their own brand pages. “Slither” and “Corpse Bride” both did good jobs of incorporating seeding into their marketing strategies through social networks and podcasting sites.

Promotions, promotions, promotions
A successful user-generated media promotion is like American Idolizing your brand, and it’s a natural for the entertainment industry. Fans clamor to collect memorabilia, win visits to studios and get the opportunity to meet the stars– or even be discovered themselves. Use this to your advantage in promoting your product. By adding a voting mechanism to a promotion, marketers drastically improve participation. Comedy Central’s Test Pilots contest offers users the chance to win a development deal to develop a show for Comedy Central’s “Motherload,” while Warner Music Group and AOL went a step further and partnered up to develop the online reality show and contest, “The Biz.”

It is easy to focus narrowly on video-based user-generated media campaigns, but don’t forget that user-generated media can encompass a range of other disciplines and forms such as creative writing, drawings and animation, photos or music. And, as always, encouraging users to customize provided content creates a valuable intersection where you and consumers can connect. “Corpse Bride” used a poem as part of its user-generated media to good effect.

Marketing control has shifted into consumers’ hands, and there is no better way to take advantage of this shift than with user-generated media. The outlets to distribute control can create a “brand network” for your entertainment company, energizing new generations of brand advocates while leading to a deeper engagement with your consumer audience. Embracing user-generated media as part of your marketing strategy provides a unique opportunity you can’t get with TV, print or online media — or even on your own website.

In part 2 of “Who’s Marketing Your Brand,” we will focus on two ways you can create these audience-grabbing opportunities and how you should answer the call of your consumers.