User-generated advertising - Key issues & implications for advertisers

 

Home | Intro | UGC History | What is UGC | Key Drivers | Key Issues | UGC Advertising | Conclusion

 

 

Introduction

¡°In 2006, Time magazine named ¡°you¡± as its person of the year, bringing even more attention to the new social phenomenon of engaging consumers in the creation and submission of content of all types. From Super Bowl ads to personal profiles, consumers are now participating side by side with companies to create user-generated content (UGC) sites¡± (Littleton, 2007).

 

Rapid advances in digital technology make it possible for anyone with a computer and a digital camera to create multimedia content that can potentially be viewed by tens of thousand of people (Universial McCann, 2006). Millions of people are now active participants of user-generated content with the aids of this personal multimedia. Particularly, Web 2.0 phenomenon, reflected in the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace.com, and video sharing services like YouTube.com, has created a new breed of amateur creators of advertising (Pfanner, 2006). Accordingly, the ad industry also enters the new era in the world of advertising. As millions of consumers publish content on websites, advertisers are afforded new ad-revenue and brand building opportunities (Akamai, 2006). To take advantage of this trend, advertisers should overcome a couple of barriers. First, user-generated advertising should be partially controlled by advertisers to deliver messages without deteriorating intended marketing communication strategies. Second, user-generated advertising should be delivered in a credible way so that the ads are more likely to be trustworthy (Mandese, 2006). Third, user-generated ads should satisfy a common interest although they are made from one or a few people's points of view.

In this website, we will examine the following topics as a timeline from where the web began, and, in relation to the beginning of the web, where user-generated content began, to implications for the world of advertising.

 

•  History of user-generated content

-   World Wide Web

-  Advent of user-generated content

 

•  Key drivers for UGC proliferation

-  Technological advances

-  Popularization of digital personal media

-  Structural shift in media industry

 

•  What is user-generated content?

- What is the definition?

-  Who are key generators?

-  State of user-generated content

 

•  UGC Key issues and implications for advertisers

-  Social network

-  Collective intelligence

-  Copyright issues

 

•  UGC in the world of advertising

-  Overview

-  Case studies

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