Why spend millions on promotion and advertisement campaigns, when consumers are willing to do it for way less? There has been an increasing trend of consumer-generated advertisement which is promotion through the input of the consumers. By using consumers to create advertisements, there is more engagement of the consumer with the business allowing for communicative participation.

Through the use of consumer-generated ads, much of the research about the brand and product is conducted by the consumer. However, we have always been taught that people are inherently lazy. Therefore, why are consumers participating in the production of ads? According to Campbell, Pitt, Parent & Berthon (2011), besides the inherent monetary reward, there are three main motivations as to why consumers generate in the promotion process, namely, (1) intrinsic enjoyment, (2) self-promotion and (3) change perception.

LayFrito was one of the leading companies to use consumer-generated advertisements successfully through extracting all the motivational concepts. Doritos, the nacho chips brand, started the campaign ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ in the fall of 2006. This campaign gave consumers the chance to create an advertisement for Doritos that would be aired during the Super Bowl with about 141.1 million viewers. In 2006, there were 1065 advertisements of 30 seconds sent to Doritos for the reward money of 10,000 dollars and two tickets to see the finals in Detroit. Doritos furthermore, motivated their consumers through intrinsic enjoyment of the creation of the advertisement as well as sell-promotion as they are the ones staring in the advertisement.

However one of the main fears of letting consumers create advertisement is that there might be less consistency in the company’s message (Thompson & Malaviya, 2013). Since the advertisement might not be in line with the overall vision of the company, there are some downsides in handing the responsibility to consumers. However during the ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ campaign, the submitted advertisements juried by the organization funneling them down to the 10 best advertisements.

The 10 best advertisements were then announced and the consumers had the opportunity to vote for their favorite advertisement to be aired during the Super Bowl. This again created consumer participation in the advertisement process by motivating consumers to have the perception that they can change the outcome of the advertisement. Through voting, the ‘Live the Flavor’ ad won the campaign and was the first ever consumer-generated advertisement to be aired during the Super Bowl. According to the USA Today Ad Meter poll, the ‘Live the Flavor’ ad was ranked the number 4 best commercial during the Super Bowl (USA Today, 2007).

Ever since Doritos has repeatedly created the ‘Crash the Super Bowl campaign to result in 4900 submitted advertisements between 2014-2015 to win the grand prize of 1 million dollars and a year-long contract at Universal Studies for the so-called dream job. Doritos is one of the best examples of how to successfully engage the consumer in the generation of advertisements.

References

Campbell, C., Pitt, L. F., Parent, M., & Berthon, P. R. (2011). Understanding consumer converstations around ads in a Web 2.0 world. Journal of Advertising, 40(1), 87-102.

Thompson, D. V., & Malaviya, P. (2013). Consumer-Generated Ads: Does awareness of advertising co-creation help or hurt persuasion? Journal of Marketing, 77, 33-47.

USA Today. (2007, February 5). USA Today. Retrieved from Anheuser-Busch Wins USA TODAY Ad Meter: http://www.usatoday.com/