Daily Archives: July 13, 2007

Consumer generated content.

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I don’t want to sound like a broken CD, but this whole consumer generated content (CGC) thing in marketing is really getting to me. Consumers recommending products to other consumers is an important, integral part of marketing. It’s what happens to good products during the normal course of the selling and buying process. Traditionally, that happens after marketers and ad agencies have done their jobs and a transaction has occurred. But CGC takes the agencies and marketer out of the process. It’s lazy. 
 
Are marketers and ad agencies so burned out that they can’t figure out new, compelling ways sell? Isn’t that what they are saying every time they sponsor a CGC contest? Where have all the industry’s creative people gone?
 
I believe it has something to do with the way we ingest media. For entertainment and relaxation most Americans ingest media. They take in TV, radio, and video games. Often this is mindless, inbound entertainment. Reading books is a form of ingested media, but it does require interpretation, concentration and visualization.
 
Creative individuals do less ingesting of media and more thinking. They look for patterns and lack of patterns, mashing up things to form new ideas. Artists has always gravitated toward advertising, because they are more right brained. They ingest less drivel.
 
As the industry cedes more and more of its creativity to consumers, it will dig itself deeper into a hole, out of which it will be hard to crawl.