What follows is a big-time blind item chronicling one of the most colossal failures in user-generated marketing you probably haven’t heard about. I’m omitting the names of the actual players to protect the innocent/guilty (but watch for the obvious hints). The story itself serves as a cautionary tale for marketers who might be considering user-generated campaigns as an easy way to build their brands by letting users do the “heavy lifting” for them online.

During a recent Super Bowl broadcast, a classic American beer brand ran a single national TV spot prompting viewers to visit their Web site for a major user-generated promotion. After visiting the beer brand’s site, users would get to see a video clip featuring the beginning and ending of a comedic “skin flick” in the style of the racy-yet-tame teenage sex comedies frequently broadcast late at night on basic cable. No explanation was offered for the missing “middle” footage, other than a prompt for users to register on the site and submit their own short script ideas for what transpires in-between. The winning script would earn its author an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood, to shoot and direct the middle section of this opus with the help of an experienced film crew and some “major” film industry players. Upon project completion, the winner would get to screen his/her finished film on the beer brand’s Web site, boast major bragging rights and presumably have a foot fairly wedged in the proverbial Hollywood door. In return, the classic American beer brand would have driven user registration to stratospheric levels on its burgeoning online entertainment/branding site—a win-win for all involved.

Adding credence and cachet to the beer brand’s promotion were the other players involved in the affair—fairly big names which included staff writers from the most successful sit-com ever featuring a stand-up comic, and a major Hollywood production company launched by two popular male actor “buddies” who have enjoyed Oscar recognition for their co-screenwriting work.

Alas, what may have looked good on paper proved to be a spectacular marketing dud. During the entry submission period, which lasted a couple of months, the site received a fair number of page views, a modest bump in user registrations, but absolutely no script submissions. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Absent an actual script, the marketers would have to abort the entire promotion, an altogether unthinkable outcome—given the big names involved. So in true Hollywood fashion, an ad campaign insider tipped off an unaffiliated film school buddy looking for an easy break, who finally submitted a dreadful script (the one and only such submission) that was all-too-swiftly declared the winner “from thousands of entries.” The final piece of truly unwatchable dreck was eventually produced and broadcast on the classic American beer brand’s Web site—to little fanfare, and even fewer page views. And a Major Advertiser With Profoundly Deep Pockets learned a hard lesson in user-generated content promotion: it’s harder than you think.

Some points to ponder when considering a user-generated effort:

1)    Make it age-appropriate: The skin-flick film genre used in the promotion attracted an age group that was well below the age registration requirement of the beer brand’s Web site, so interested users couldn’t legally register on the site in the first place. (And older users just weren’t interested in participating at all.)

2)    Keep it simple: Despite (or perhaps because of) the big names involved, this particular promotion was too convoluted and required too much work on the part of users (write a cohesive script?) to drive participation. The online world is about instant gratification. Writing a script takes time and effort. Whatever content you expect users to contribute should be relatively easy to produce and upload in a short amount of time.

3)    Downplay your branding: Most young adult online users have a wildly independent streak. They can smell a slick marketing effort a mile away. And the bigger the brand, the bigger the target. Keep the brand placement modest and allow for maximum user customization. This may be scary for zealous brand managers, since the online user community is nothing if not unpredictable, but users need freedom in order to generate content (see YouTube).

4)    Avoid time limits: You shouldn’t expect to fit a user-generated campaign within a strict time frame (say, a couple of months). Successful user generation sometimes requires more time (yes, even years) to take hold and propagate.

5)    Learn to let go: See point #3 above. Understand that once you get the ball rolling on a user-generated campaign, you have to let go. If you try to control the brand image too strictly, users will most likely be turned off and click away.

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director/Senior Copywriter

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