Marketers and content companies are still unsure of how much control to relinquish when it comes to UGC. On a Promax/BDA session looking at the issues of UGC and control, Alex Ellerson, YouTube’s director for entertainment and premium content partnerships, touted the site’s “claim your content” program, that allows producers to identify and remove unauthorized videos, as well as its video fingerprinting test with Time Warner and Disney that was announced this past week.
— The Right Balance: “The promotional benefits of repurposing content are substantial. CBS is a content partner of ours. They’ve told us that the tune-in lift from showing The Late Show With David Letterman has gone up 5 percent, while The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson has seen a 7 percent lift as a result. But that’s not the limit. For the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, Lucusfilm allowed fans to create mashups of the movie. They not only allowed it, they encouraged it by making the source content available. The lawyers may have gone crazy, but they realized that it lets fans deeply engage with content – more deeply than any other way. And it’s important that if content providers are given the choice, they will allow fans to interact with their material, ultimately enhancing the content’s value and reach. That’s the model we’re working towards.”
— Trust The User: Roger Jehenson, co-founder and president of UGENmedia, a company that bridges marketing and UGC, pointed to the cost of a traditional ad and a promotion by Converse from last year, that asked users to create their own commercials for the sneaker company. “There were about 30,000 ads created. Everyone who creates an ad is sharing that with someone. A 30-second ad can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The homemade videos people created for Converse took an average of three hours to do and maybe a few hundred dollars at most. And think about the cost of demographic research that typically goes into a media buy. It’s a given that the people who created these thousands of ads sent their commercial to people they know. If each user sent it only to one person, that quite a lot for a relatively free media buy. Now, a lot of companies will say to us, ‘Why should I let people bash me on a site that I’m paying for.’ Now, filtering out inappropriate content or usage is important. But we can do it. And we should do it. The benefits are clear. At the very least, that’s true from a marketing research standpoint. Besides, I always tell people that if they can’t say it on your site, they’ll say it somewhere else.”
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