If consumers is your Agency, it's time for a review

Dear consumer of XYZ brand, your 15 minutes are over. You are no good in developing stories and content. While brands were once heralded as brilliant marketing and communication strategists, as they handed over their marketing to the public –consumers (in the name of relationship) produced content for Doritos, the Peperami site, Career Builder, Heinz, Folgers; the content appeared anywhere from dedicated websites to the marketing world's highest profile platform, the Super Bowl– lately the results have been far from desired.

While Doritos and CareerBuilder produced some funny spots, Kraft Foods even reached to inviting consumers to create a new name for its Australian favourite brand “Vegemite” yielded the ridiculous (awful!!) brand name iSnack2.0. Heinz's call in 2008 for consumers to create a commercial for the ketchup brand was answered by Matt Cozza, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, but the premise was not exactly revolutionary: a man sits down at restaurant and finds his bottle of Heinz missing, so he steals one from another table, setting off a chain reaction of thefts. WoW ideas (ha ha)!!

Uninspired is one thing; bad is quite another. Lately, Folger's Coffee is running a US contest under the name “Wake-Up call” asking the Average Joe to update its famous "Best Part of Wakin' Up" theme. The results have been downright painful in many cases, eliciting our sympathy for "American Idol" judge Kara DioGuardi, who gets to choose the winner from five online finalists in early June.

"You're getting these very poor quality spots, and it's not even done in seriousness anymore. It's almost like a joke," said San Diego-based brand strategist Denise Lee Yohn to AdAge. "It's almost like a parody, and it's being treated like a game. That's definitely affecting the quality of what we're seeing." The biggest flaw with this strategy isn't that it can produce crummy work, but that it sells short the idea of consumer-generated marketing. Making a spot is far less interesting and effective than engaging people with your brand and creating enthusiasts, said Jackie Huba, co-author of the book "Citizen Marketer" who writes the Church of the Customer blog. "These contests asking people to create commercials and jingles are contrived," said Ms. Huba. "Marketers should be leveraging word-of-mouth jet streams. It's all about creating a great service for their customers, not necessarily about their customers creating ads."  Ilya Vedrashko, who works in media design at Hill Holliday studying relationships marketers build with traditional and emerging media and writes the popular blog Advertising Lab, said, "…most times it's just brutal to look at, something an agency wouldn't even show the client."

After this debate has evolved widespread, I can only think that the consumer-generated advertising creative isn’t bad; it's just that people can not upscale the execution as expert professionals can.