Warning: user generated ads can damage your brand
It must have seemed like a cool idea at the time. Last year Chevrolet hooked up with the US apprentice show and ran banner ads allowing users to remix their own TV commercial for the Chevy Tahoe. The results weren’t quite what they expected. Environmental activists and culture jammers jumped at the opportunity to have a pop at the gas-guzzling 4×4.
You can watch more of the unfortunate, brand-damaging, user-gen ads here. It’s interesting that comments from users defending the ads are often attacked by other posters as potentially being the work of Chevy’s employees.
Read more about this disastrous and ill-conceived campaign here.
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Interestingly wired magazine wrote a long piece about this campaign last year and were positive about the way Chevrolet handled the negative ads – they even went as far as saying that Chevrolet were one of the only brands that “got it”:
From the article:
“In fact, Kosak and her team had assumed all along that they’d get some negative responses, and they decided they’d lose all credibility if they pulled any of them down. Ed Peper, Chevy’s general manager, pointed out in a post on GM’s FastLane blog that the Tahoe can run on ethanol and gets better gas mileage than other large SUVs, but as far as Chevy was concerned, that was that. As Kosak puts it, “We don’t take uncalculated risks.”
…”BY ANY OBJECTIVE MEASURE, the Tahoe Apprentice campaign has to be judged a success. The microsite attracted 629,000 visitors by the time the contest winner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers’ sites.Sales took off too, even though it was spring and SUV purchases generally peak in late fall. Since its introduction in January, the new Tahoe has accounted for more than a quarter of all full-size SUVs sold, outpacing its nearest competitor, the Ford Expedition, 2 to 1. In March, the month the campaign began, its market share hit nearly 30 percent. By April, according to auto-information service Edmonds, the average Tahoe was selling in only 46 days – quite a change from the year before, when models languished on dealers’ lots for close to four months.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/tahoe_pr.html
and more:
“Even the hooting among marketing pros died down after Scott Donaton, the editor of Advertising Age, asked in a column for a show of hands from all those who think the campaign proved the dangers of user-created content. “Ah, yes,” he wrote, “there’s quite a few arms raised – you’re all free to go, actually; the marketing business doesn’t need your services anymore. We have a toy railroad set as your lovely parting gift.”
“Donaton was taking aim at central tenet of “golden age” mass-media marketing: that by controlling the ad message, Madison Avenue can somehow control perception of the product. “When you do a consumer-generated campaign, you’re going to have some negative reaction,” Dilworth says. “But what’s the option – to stay closed? That’s not the future. And besides, do you think the consumer wasn’t talking about the Tahoe before?” They were, of course; the difference is that in the YouTube era, the illusion of control is no longer sustainable. “You can either stay in the bunker, or you can jump out there and try to participate,” he says. “And to not participate is criminal.”