iSelfPromote

Business Week’s marketing blog says there is already a “variety of user-generated ads” on YouTube for the iPhone. The lesson extracted from this is that: “the power of YouTube is amazing” and “every brand must wake up to this.” Given how many times I’ve read that exact same epiphany, I’m surprised there are brands that haven’t, but anything is possible.

Anyway, I’d like to point out what’s actually interesting about user-generated ads for a product that isn’t on the market yet. This is the issue of motivation. Is this brand evangelism, or some other expression of product fandom? If so, that’s pretty weird, given that the grass-roots ad makers haven’t tried the iPhone, and know nothing more about its quality than what Steve Jobs has asserted. The idea that people would not only scramble to buy the new new thing without hearing any unbiased opinions from trusted friends (isn’t that what’s driving the big word of mouth revolution? that we trust our friends, not companies or traditional authority figures?), but actually create promotional content on behalf of that thing, would seem to be evidence that consumer manipulation has reached a new level — gullibility 2.0, perhaps.

The more likely explanation, I suspect, is co-promotion. A year ago, in Consumed, I wrote about Firefox’s user-generated ad contest, in the context of the popular marketing concept of “co-creation,” which refers to ways that companies and brands “allow” consumers to collaborate with them. As noted there, the winners of Firefox’s contest both happened to be people eyeing a career in the making of ads and films, and who pretty obviously saw enterting the contest as a way to promote themselves by skillfully promoting Firefox. Thus: co-promotion.

Indeed, it looks some, and maybe a lot, of the “user-generated” ads for the iPhone are connected to a similar contest from a company called ViralMedium — “your chance to show the world you’ve got the vision to write a script, cast your actors, and throw in some mind-blowing effects for the most revolutionary product to come along in decades, the Apple iPhone.”

It’s not clear whether ViralMedium was hired by Apple to do this, or is simply jumping onto the iPhone bandwagon to promote itself. In any case, I suspect that anybody taking the time to make a home-brew iPhone ad basically recognizes that the product is going to be a big deal, swathed in hype and attention — and they want in on that. It’s a way to participate in what will probably qualify as at least a low-grade cultural phenomenon, so that when people get around to searching for all things related to the iPhone, these grass-roots ads will be among those things. If one of them is good, it’ll get forwarded around, and the creator will become Internet-famous at the very least. My guess, in other words, is that this is not about evangelizing for Apple’s brand. It’s about leeching off of Apple’s brand.

Which is both more interesting than the mere fact of yet more unsanctioned ads on YouTube, and also (I can only assume) more important for brand managers to understand.