How about user-generated commercials on YouTube?
YouTube has spent years trying to figure out how to monetize its mostly amateur-quality, user-created content.
The company has turned to pre-roll and post-roll ads, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledges that the "perfect ad product for YouTube has not been invented yet."
Perhaps Google is looking to the wrong inventors.
Traditional "Madison Avenue" advertising has failed YouTube. I agree with the sentiment expressed recently on the Marcom Professional blog:
In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality....People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless commercial messages all the time. We crave authenticity.
So why not user-generated commercials? Yes, I know there are all sorts of trademark and other concerns, but let's face it: I'd rather watch an amateur video for Heinz Ketchup than just about anything Heinz could develop. (In fact, someone just sent me this homemade video for "Ketchup Boy," pitching Heinz Ketchup.) I bet user-generated commercials would actually become a destination in and of themselves.
How about it, Google?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The appealing nature home made video, relative to user-created YouTube ads, precisely relates to major recent Intuit research. This relates to our desire to show off a bit, to get personal recognition for our efforts, to give recognition to kindred spirits and to give something back for the help others have given us. Madison Avenue cannot package that. </p><p> Intuit found that users preferred getting their answers from other users, especially those in their industry, rather than from Intuit tech support people. That is why Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, gave 7 million TurboTax users many in-context help links. The Live Community system uses the in-context location and user question to suggest two or three possible answers. If the user does not like them, then one click posts their question to a specific applicable or new user-to-user forum thread, in a Wiki-enabled site. The result was dramatic. In the first year TurboTax users answered 40% of questions from other users, faster than Intuit personnel could. They also tended to give better answers. They did so for what Brad descrivbes as essemtially "no cost." </p><p> Intuit is extending the Live Community to all products and adding lots of short instructional video to its help. This has been so effective that intuit cut 7% of its total staff from tech support people. It also formed a new company, with which it will work, for ex-employees who want to stay in tech support..YES! User involvement and customer-directed-innovation is the future, but then it had been for 25 years or more. </p><p>
The appealing nature home made video, relative to user-created YouTube ads, precisely relates to major recent Intuit research. This relates to our desire to show off a bit, to get personal recognition for our efforts, to give recognition to kindred spirits and to give something back for the help others have given us. Madison Avenue cannot package that. </p><p> Intuit found that users preferred getting their answers from other users, especially those in their industry, rather than from Intuit tech support people. That is why Brad Smith, Intuit CEO, gave 7 million TurboTax users many in-context help links. The Live Community system uses the in-context location and user question to suggest two or three possible answers. If the user does not like them, then one click posts their question to a specific applicable or new user-to-user forum thread, in a Wiki-enabled site. The result was dramatic. In the first year TurboTax users answered 40% of questions from other users, faster than Intuit personnel could. They also tended to give better answers.</p><p> Intuit is extending the Live Community effort to all products, while adding lots of short instructional videos to its help. This has been so effective that intuit cut 7% of its total staff from tech support people. It also formed a new company, with which it will work, for former employees who wish to stay in tech support.</p><p> This user-to-user help and the related user-to-user Youtube commercials are sure to provide better user satisfaction and bigger returns for the companies. Youtube and others will probably embrace such commercials very quickly, because the top management consultant at Google (and much of Silicon Valley) is Intuit Chair Bill Campbell.
My 25 year reference refers to when Intuit began building its customer-directed-innovation future. Here is a link to Brad Smith announcing the related user-to-user help effort:
http://1234567890.typepad.com/quickbooks/brad-smith---amazing-intuit-ceo/
The actual video is at the end of the post, which largely says what I did above.
- by bandido23 November 11, 2008 7:21 PM PST
- There's a new website that just launched dedicated to user-generated commercials www.badvertising.com You guys should check it out!!!
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