Forget Trendy Roll-Your-Own Ad Campaigns

Nick Carr writes about the “bad ad fad.”  He’s referring to user-generated ads, pointing to a campaign by Heinz that he claims is backfiring.  The New York Times wrote about the campaign, which enables consumers to create and post video ads about Heinz ketchup, pickles and other products.

I agree that user-generated ad campaigns – besides being expensive and time-consuming — can quickly leave you feeling like you have a tiger by the tail.  If you are used to controlling your brand and going to great lengths to evoke just the right perception, a user-generated ad campaign wrests control from you. 

It’s hard to see the ROI in spending scads of money to give people a platform to make fun of your brand and tear down what your company has spent millions of dollars to build.

There’s another problem with roll-your-own video campaigns when it comes to selling to the small business market. They are just not the best vehicles to gain attention of small business owners anyway. 

I often have likened marketing to business owners as similar to marketing to consumers — many of the same approaches apply. But this is one instance where you cannot treat business owners like consumers.

Business owners do not have hours to spend coming up with videos to participate in advertising campaigns.  If they did, I’d question how successful their own businesses are.

If you want to do something that involves user input to reach small business owners, a better advertising approach is what I suggested back in September over at Small Business Trends:   use testimonial-based ads or survey-based ads.  Those are two tried-and-true B2B marketing methods. They involve some degree of input from users/customers, so at least they give a nod to user-generated content.

Maybe they are not as creative as trendy contests to create YouTube videos. But they are more likely to make a positive impact on your desired audience and actually get small business owners to buy something.