The High Price of Creating Free Ads

By LOUISE STORY
Published: May 26, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/business/26content.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin

From an advertiser’s perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.

But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.

In one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.

Heinz has said it will pick five of the entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of, say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps oh so slowly out of the bottle.

Consumer brand companies have been busy introducing campaigns like Heinz’s that rely on user-generated content, an approach that combines the populist appeal of reality television with the old-fashioned gimmick of a sweepstakes to select a new advertising jingle. Pepsi, Jeep, Dove and Sprint have all staged promotions of this sort, as has Doritos, which proudly publicized in February that the consumers who made one of its Super Bowl ad did so on a $12 budget.

But these companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.

Some people, meanwhile, have been using the contests as an opportunity to scrawl digital graffiti on the sponsor and its brand. Rejected Heinz submissions have been showing up on YouTube anyway, and visitors to Heinz’s page on the site have written that the ketchup maker is clearly looking for “cheap labor” and that Heinz is “lazy” to ask consumers to do its marketing work.

“That’s kind of a popular misnomer that, somehow, it’s cheaper to do this,” said David Ciesinski, vice president for Heinz Ketchup. “On the contrary, it’s at least as expensive, if not more.”

Heinz has hired an outside promotions firm to watch all the videos and forward questionable ones to Heinz employees in its Pittsburgh headquarters. So far, they have rejected more than 370 submissions (at least 320 remain posted on YouTube). The gross-out factor is not among their screening criteria — rather, most of the failed entries were longer than the 30-second time limit, entirely irrelevant to the contest or included songs protected by copyright. Some of the videos displayed brands other than Heinz (a big no-no) or were rejected because “they wouldn’t be appropriate to show mom,” Mr. Ciesinski said.

Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September.

“These are just so bad,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is not involved with Heinz’s contest.

One of the most viewed Heinz videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Scott Goodson, chief executive of StrawberryFrog, an advertising agency based in New York, said the shortcomings of contest entries — not just those for Heinz — refuted predictions that user-generated content might siphon work away from agencies. “This Heinz campaign, much like the same ones done by Doritos, Converse and Dodge, only goes to show how hard it is to do great advertising,” he said.

In a traditional ad campaign, a client like Heinz will meet with its advertising agencies to come up with a central idea, often a tagline like MasterCard’s “Priceless.” The creative departments then design the ads while the media planners figure out where they should run. Except for the occasional focus group, consumers are largely on the receiving end.

In campaigns that solicit work from the public, the model appears to be quite different — consumers, after all, create the ads. But, in reality, ad agencies and brand marketers are still doing much of the legwork. Heinz and Doritos spent months planning their user-generated contests, hiring lawyers to vet them and designing advertisements to promote them. Then they assigned employees to wade through entries.

“These contests have nothing to do with cost savings,” said Jared Dougherty, a spokesman for Frito-Lay, the division of PepsiCo that owns the Doritos brand.

While the winners of the Doritos contest may have spent only $12, Doritos spent about $1.3 million on advertising in October, according to estimates from Nielsen Monitor-Plus. And that was when it was promoting the contest, which invited people to create a 30-second commercial that would run during the Super Bowl. Doritos received 1,020 videos and awarded prizes of $10,000 to five finalists.

And then Doritos, a unit of the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, spent more than $8 million on advertising in February when it showed the top five commercials, more than any month in the last two years, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Other companies are also spending handsomely to present user-generated content to the public. Last Tuesday, KFC put on a commercial during “American Idol” that consisted entirely of clips about KFC that consumers had posted on the Internet — even without a contest. Heinz, too, says that customers have been making videos starring its bottle long before its contest and posting them on sites like YouTube.

Heinz has run ads for its contest during “American Idol” and other television shows (as well as in large newspapers like The New York Times), but it has gone a step further: it has converted all the labels on its bottles and ketchup packets into ads for the contest. This was a major initiative that involved everything from building new industrial printing plates to timing the shipment of bottles so they would appear on shelves at the beginning of May, said Mr. Ciesinski of Heinz.

And for all of Heinz’s effort, the interests of many of the contestants lie far outside its own. Steve Sass, 48, who taped two Heinz commercials, is running for president as a write-in candidate. Ed Barry, 34, writes sketches about a character named Vinny and is trying to get his work noticed. Some contestants say in interviews that they prefer mustard or mayonnaise.

Michelle Cale, a 39-year-old Web designer in Morgantown, W.Va., has a more traditional motive. “It is a substantial sum of money, which, of course, caught my eye,” she said.

In one of Ms. Cale’s two Heinz videos, after dropping her children at school, she spends the day playing with a bottle of ketchup at the park. As she plays with the bottle on the playground as if it were a child, she proclaims, “you mean so much to me.” Then she pours ketchup on a juicy hamburger to eat it.

Then there is Dan Burke, who brushed his teeth and shaved with ketchup, and said he hoped the vulgarity would help his video stand out. A 20-year-old college student in Centerville, Ohio, Mr. Burke wants to win and to use the prize money to attend a two-year training program in wrestling.

He described his strategy: “I just thought to myself, ‘What is the single strangest thing I can do with ketchup?’ ”

20 Great Employers for New Grads

They're not DSW, but some alternatives.

20 Great Employers for New Grads

Fortune teamed up with Experience Inc. to find companies that offer impressive perks to new hires just out of college - ranging from generous salaries to workplace flexibility, from enviable benefits to serious growth opportunities.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0705/gallery.great_for_new_grads.fortune/index.html

Weiden + Kennedy -- 25th Anniversary

John, Darrel, and Jon know how to throw a party, but gotta admit, the W+K 25th looks fun.

FOUNDERS DAY XXV

http://wkstudio.typepad.com/studio/2007/04/rock_steady_cre.html

SMB Marcom, DM Consultant

SMB Marcom, DM Consultant

Responsible for strategic concepting, planning, guidance and production of HSB small business direct mail. Must be able to work in a fast-paced transactional work environment. This includes driving strategy and production of catalog projects from initial briefing through blueline review. The position demands an individual that excels at building relationships, delivering materials on time every time, and is extremely detailed-oriented. Strategic planning, multi-tasking, process development/improvement skills and the ability to work with internal clients/external vendors necessary.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:
Route projects to internal clients, compile edits and submit revisions to the agency on time through every step of the review process. Achieve 100% accuracy in execution, pricing, configurations and claims. Manage internal and external scheduling of direct mail reviews. Build, maintain, and leverage relationships with an external direct mail agency and internal brand managers, legal, operations, finance and other marcom team members. Review direct mail metrics and make placement and creative recommendations to decrease cost per call and increase HSB small business sales calls. Schedule and attend research sessions as needed. Light travel required for press reviews and research.

Qualifications:
> Thorough knowledge of marketing strategy, tools, concepts and techniques
> Strong written and verbal communication skills.
> Strong organization, planning and presentation skills.
>Detail-oriented. Ability to deal with ambiguity.
> Ability to work cross functionally in order to achieve desired results
> Ability to work with outside vendors and build good business relationships
> Bachelor's degree or equivalent, with a minimum of 4 years of related merchandising, marketing or agency experience.
> Working knowledge of graphic production and printing.

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> Strong business/marketing analysis skills are essential.
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> Attention to detail and appreciation for strong project management process, techniques and tools is a must.

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Job responsibilities will include:
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> Must be able to work across multiple organizations to translate product marketing and business objectives into creative, transactional and/or relationship developing
e-mail.
> Manager of internal production team.
> Direct and project manage external creative agency and in-house product marketing (brand), developers, designers, and copywriters to create and deliver email content.
> Work will include creating testing/versioning plans, furthering contact strategy, monitoring privacy policy, and targeting 100% accuracy in all our e-mail programs.
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> Work with metrics team to determine and document learnings and best practices for successful merchandising, design and content decisions.

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