This is something for Christian, a fellow Ph.D. student who probably knows all of this stuff: Wired wrote an article about the downs and ups of Chevy’s journey into crowdsourcing, the abdication of advertising control to consumers.
The early buzz on Chevrolet’s invitation last spring to have visitiors to their site design an ad for the gas-guzzling Tahoe SUV was mostly ridicule. Critics used the forum to highlight the death-trappedness of the vehicle, the sexual compensation its size offers men, and its role in global warming. However, Chevy took the bad with the good and wound up with a significant number of entries, about 700,000 site visitors, and a sales boom. In fact, the experience — which included the purchase an episode of The Apprentice, season five — was so positive, the company is taking their eco-friendly features of other products on similar adventures in marketing. Reduceuruse.com is supposed to be “a YouTube-like site” where owners of fuel-efficient Chevys post videos of how they spend their free time earned by avoiding the gas pump.
Control the message, control the market. That used to be the economic hammer for companies, but times are a’changing. Said Campbell-Ewald exec Ed Dilworth, “You can either stay in the bunker, or you can jump out there and try to participate. And to not participate is criminal.”
Frank Rose’s article concludes with the following:
Consumer-generated advertising has led to some seriously upside-down behavior. Brands that once yelled at us now ask what we have to say. No longer content to define our identity (Gap kids, the Marlboro man), they ask us to help define theirs. But none of this is stranger than the idea that you can sell a product by sitting back and letting people put their own spin on it.
Of course, a quick click on the links above give the impression that the Chevy crowdsourcing is, indeed, off the Net. Links to the original Tahoe ad maker and library lead nowhere, and the Reduceuruse.com site redirects to a page about fuel-efficiency in Chevy products. Does it matter? The fact remains that Wired wrote the article, I read and blogged about it, and you are reading it now. Ultimately, the effect of their efforts may be no more than spam, where success comes from massive viewing and a very small conversion rate into sales. The big difference is that the company is only providing the scaffolding; the consumers are doing the spamming.
