Crystal ball: consumers, not actors, will soon be promoting brands

Promoting brands with no compensation: No wonder you were the person of the year.

Look around you, it’s everywhere. User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most effective ways marketers can engage consumers with their brands. Whether staged or real, genuine or for monetary benefits, there is a common thread: brands utilize user videos or other types of multimedia content to promote a product or cause, and that content is then used as part of a marketing campaign and circulated around the media and internet, hopefully in viral fashion.

There are numerous successful utilizations of UGC video marketing, including the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, the Share Your Heart video campaign by CaringBridge, and Pepsi’s half-time show at the latest Super Bowl where hundreds of users introduced Beyoncé for her halftime performance. Users got engaged, created marketing content, promoted the brand, and most received no compensation in return. No wonder we were Time’s Person of the Year.

But while brands are scarce on compensation, they don’t skimp on promises. Brands use different means to entice people to market their products through UGC, some more effectively than others. Photo-sharing social network Instagram recently made headlines by trying to say that it owned licensing rights to all user images (it has since backtracked), while brands like Armani and Whole Foods ask users to take photos of themselves using their products, or to tell their stories with the possibility of winning free merchandise. This has been quite successful because thousands of users are promoting these brands within their social networks, and only a very select few of them ever receive any compensation. It’s a very cheap and effective way to reach consumers. Marketers no longer need humongous multi-million dollar budgets to reach the masses. They just need a social media presence and a clever campaign.

One of the best brands at using and promoting UGC is Coca Cola. If you were to visit Coca Cola’s Facebook page you’ll find this statement in the description: “The Coca-Cola Facebook Page is a collection of your stories showing how people from around the world have helped make Coke into what it is today.”

In other words, Coca Cola’s presence on Facebook is solely meant to solicit the creation of UGC marketing content. With such a big company dedicating its social media presence just to UGC, the future for marketing is looking more and more clear. Less actors will be promoting brands in the future, in favor of rank-and-file consumers.

-Zeyad Maasarani