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UGC is a two-way conversation

Platform: Internet | Author: Michael Nutley | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 15.02.07

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The appearance on Zoo magazine's website this week of a pornographic image uploaded by a user highlights the central problem faced by media owners, agencies and brands as they try to embrace user-generated content (UGC). As Alex Bogusky, chief creative officer of US agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky so neatly puts it in our podcast this month, consumers like to play rough - often much rougher than the brands themselves would like (nmapodcast.co.uk).

UGC has been the hot topic in the...

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... industry for over a year now. As the latest manifestation of the shift in control from producers to consumers, it has obvious appeal to media owners and agencies. Media owners love it because it's cheap, it's plentiful and it delivers exactly what the audience wants, mainly because it's the audience that's creating it. In turn, agencies are latching on to the idea that they can get consumers who love a particular brand to create advertising for it. Again this is cheap, but audiences also see it as authentic (or ideally should) in a way that they don't always with traditional advertising.

The problem, of course, is control. In our Opinion column opposite, Agency.com CEO David Eastman calls for agencies to be brave. He argues that customers will remix ads, blog about them, take them out of context anyway, so agencies need to engage with these processes. He's right, but you can't let bravery take you too far. Bogusky has a telling anecdote: CP+B received 5,000 submissions for a user-designed beer bottle label, and not a single one was usable.

This is also what media owners are finding. In order to keep their content on-brand and to avoid alienating advertisers that are already skittish about appearing next to inappropriate content, they're finding that UGC needs to be rigorously policed. As Flirtomatic head Mark Curtis put it in out Profile of him last month, "It's an operational feature of our life that we have to monitor how people use the site and make sure it's advertiser-friendly." (NMA 11.01.07)

As the balance of power shifts, everyone talks about the move to conversation and the focus has been on how this empowers consumers. But consumers will play rough and, just like in any conversation, if brands don't like the replies they'll have to walk away.

Michael Nutley, editor, NMA michael.nutley@centaur.co.uk