User-Generated Content - Success Story

Last week, I wrote about the Heinz user-generated video campaign that left the company with some egg (or ketchup?) on their face. Today, I’d like to look at the Yahoo! user-generated video campaign that appears to have been more successful.

Nick Chavez, Director of Corporate Marketing in Cool Stuff at Yahoo! explains the idea in this video posted on YouTube:

The key differences for the Yahoo! ad campaign compared with the Heinz ad campaign, I think, are these:

• Yahoo! has a maverick brand image that could comfortably encompass any weird or wacky or irreverent takes on its brand in contrast to Heinz which has a family-oriented “clean” and respectable image. In fact, a large part of the impact of the ads is the suggestive double-meaning around the word “Yahoo!” itself.

• Yahoo! seeded the campaign with an initial competition for videos made by film students, all of whom would have a personal stake in the success of their creations in terms of their career in film and advertising. They then chose the best dozen or so to seed the wider campaign, showing by the standard and quality of those films the high benchmark that others should be striving to better

The take home message from these two ad campaigns is about knowing your audience and your brand and how to leverage those two aspects to work together instead of against each other.

You can check out the various Yahoo! user-generated ads for yourself via the links below:

New Yahoo! Campaign

Videos submitted to the New Yahoo! Campaign site.

The health club student film mentioned by Nick Chavez in the video is shown below:

Here are a few more that particularly caught my eye (ear?):

Mother and daughter talking about “the change”:

What does your Yahoo! look like?

My boyfriend is always playing with his Yahoo!