Aren't we tired of campaigns based on UGC? I would say YES, but probably consumers have a different opinion, especially if you offer them to appear on TV as a reward for the (silly) things you ask them to do. In Australia, for example, GPY&R; Melbourne challenged its audience to eat a Picnic in the space of a :30 commercial break. People filmed themselves and uploaded the videos on www.itsnopicnic.tv.

The best videos have become part of the Picnic TV campaign, and have gone on air. According to Picnic PR people, over 200 different videos have been broadcasted on TV. The lesson for me here is pretty simple. You don't have to be innovative to be successfully creative. You just need to give people what they want. And, for the time being, it looks like visibility is still on consumers' wishlist...

Giving the winners TV air time is a neat twist, and probably helped to boost the numbers a bit, but I still question the value of a UGC campaign to a brand in terms of the audience that gets involved. For a brand like Picnic, a UGC campaign like this still probably makes sense, since they can go after the 'everyman' and don't need to target a specific type of customer. For many brands however, the only people that still participate in their UGC contests are serial UGC content producers, and die-hard fans that don't need to be sold on the brand and its product. UGC on its own doesn't have the draw that it once had, so you're left with a lackluster campaign that appears to have good numbers from the outside, but doesn't deliver the kind of useful and/or engaged audience that you're hoping to expose to your brand when you really look at what the numbers are from the inside.

Posted by: Cory O'Brien at February 18, 2010 05:32 AM