New Source Of Ideas For Ads: You

Some companies think they may have found a rich new source of material for advertisements aimed at consumers: the consumers themselves.

As Tracy Smith reported on The Early Show Tuesday, "interactive advertising" gives Internet users a shot at getting their ideas used in commercials.

All that's needed is a computer, a video camera, and creativity.

Case in point: MasterCard, which is running a contest calling for entrants to fill in the blanks about what is "priceless," playing off the credit card giant's famous advertising tack. The answers could be used in a MasterCard commercial.

"This is a campaign people want to play with," says Amy Fuller, a MasterCard marketing executive. "They have ideas. They want to give you your ideas. So we thought, 'Let's harness that.' "

Major brands used to leave their creative needs in the hands of Madison Avenue ad agencies, Smith points out, but these days they're turning to Main Street, asking ordinary consumers to pitch in.

The concept isn't entirely new. Back in the '50s, suburban housewives created jingles for their favorite products.

Today, companies want you to spend more time "engaged" with their brand, and that means logging on to their Web sites, where consumers get the tools they need to make their own ads.

"People don't realize that (some of) the commercials they're seeing were made by fans or Average Joes at home," observes Adweek advertising critic Barbara Lippert. " … The reality, though, is that these people really aren't Average Joes. Most of them are art students or film students or animators or cinematographers looking for a break."

People such as aspiring filmmakers Billy Federighi and Brett Snider, whose creation for Converse was just one of the consumer-created commercials the sneaker company put on the air. It showed sneaker after sneaker coming out of a copy machine, instead of paper copies.

"It was an opportunity for us to actually showcase what we can do," says Federighi. "We won $10,000 from Converse and — how many pairs of shoes did we win?""We won two pair of shoes," filled in Snider, "which we're getting brassed as trophies!"

Greg Stern, who created the Converse campaign, told Smith, "With the advent of technology, there are tools in the hands of regular consumers to actually create outlets of their own self-expression, their own creativity, in terms of films, music, that type of thing."

"They're getting a different perspective," notes Federighi. "We're more in touch with the product than someone on Madison Avenue is, probably."

The idea doesn't always work, though.

Adweek's Lippert pointed to a campaign for Chevy Tahoe that "kind of backfired. They put themselves out there, they made themselves very vulnerable, and they got thousands of environmentalists flooding the Internet saying how bad GM products they are and what gas guzzlers they are."

But for brands looking to further involve consumers, there are many benefits, Smith says.

"We're up to over 600,000 visits to Priceless.com," says MasterCard's Fuller, "where, before the launch of the contest, we had 20,000, so it was pretty significant."

"This is inevitable," asserts Lippert. "People are on the Internet, and they're making their own movies, and the technology is getting easier and easier to do. So, advertisers and agencies have to embrace it, because there's going to be more of it. And if it raises the bar of creativity and fresh ideas, that's all the better."

The winner of MasterCard's "write your own priceless ad" contest will be announced next month, and the winning commercial will be used on the air.