400 millones de personas. Unos 3 000 millones de personas

For all the attention UGC gets, there is much debate as to whether it’s a lasting trend or a passing fad. To be honest, if yours is an offline brand, a far more interesting and entertaining approach is to use online channels to enable fans to personalize content built around properties they know and love, and to share it among family and friends.

Here again, look to MasterCard. As part of a “Priceless” television campaign featuring Peyton Manning, in which the football star offers up brutally honest “Pep Talks,” the brand created a website where consumers could send personalized video greetings of Manning play- fully chiding loved ones by name and personal foibles via email and mobile phone—all while promoting the brand.

A message to a golf buddy of mine might feature Manning inton- ing, “Hey Bill, I hear you suck at golf. To be honest with you, with a hook like yours, you really ought to just give up.”

A later effort called “Suite Talk” did much the same thing, but dealt more directly with new offers from MasterCard.

NBC’s hit TV Show 30 Rock used a remarkably sophisticated solu- tion that enabled fans to send highly personalized phone and email greetings starring Alec Baldwin addressing recipients by name and

making fun of their occupation and physical characteristics, as the show’s nutty boss Jack Donaghy.

In each of these scenarios, users typically type in the recipient’s name and then choose from a selection of options about their hobbies, physical characteristics, career, or what have you. Sometimes you’re able to enter a text message or even a photograph or video. Then the content is mashed on the fly and delivered to the recipient in a remarkably seamless way.

Indeed, in some of the most astonishing such executions seen to date, cable television network FX in the U.K. used truly amazing “per- sonalizable video” technology to enable fans of the creepy serial-mur- derer-as-hero show Dexter to create customized faux television news snippets that name and even display user-uploaded pictures of friends as possible targets of the show’s killer.

Such initiatives demonstrate many key benefits of on-demand media. They’re easy-to-use. They’re highly personalizable. And they’re eminently sharable—immersing both sender and receiver in the brand experience in phenomenal (and potentially viral) ways.

No video camera or editing software required.

“Rather than have the message being created from the brand itself, it’s always better for the brand to create a window that users can talk to each other through—so it’s from your friend, as opposed to from the [brand],” says Dominick O’Brien, interaction designer for Glue London, a digital agency behind personalizable video efforts for clients such as the Royal Navy.

All of this said, if you’re going to let consumers shape the brand itself for mass audiences, you could do worse than Jones Soda, which has essentially built its brand on consumer-influenced content.

The Seattle-based company long ago began enabling users to send in photographs to use as bottle labels. Today, it has over a mil- lion submissions and has used upward of 4,500 of the photos on its bottles—which consumers can collect and trade on the Jones Soda website. Even if your photo isn’t selected, you can order a case of

soda in your own custom bottles, featuring your image or design, for a small fee.

“We allowed the labels to be discovered, and that gave consumers a sense of ownership. It makes it more relevant to them and provides an emotional connection,” Peter van Stolk, the forty-year-old founder of Jones Soda, tells Business Week. “With big soda brands, the ‘Britney Spears model’—paying a lot of money to some hot artist to sponsor your beverage—is just so done. The wonderful thing about our com- petitors is, for all the money they have, they should be thinking more originally but they don’t. If they ever do, I’m dead.”6

I W

M

ME-TV

Still, the lure of user-generated video contests seems to hold sway— for now at least.

For its part, Heinz found its “Top This” TV promotion was so popular that it received over 4,000 entries, with consumer votes giving the grand prize to Matt Cozza of Chicago, whose arguably profes- sional-quality entry, titled “Now We Can Eat,” won top honors—and $57,000 in cash.

“We know there are many loyal consumers out there who want to creatively express their passion for Heinz Ketchup,” says David Ciesinski, vice president for the brand. “Clearly, people put a tremen- dous amount of time, passion, energy, and creativity into their videos, and it really showed.”7

Indeed, the campaign is credited with contributing to double-digit increases in sales. Heinz was so pleased, in fact, it has since gone on to run subsequent “Top This” TV contests.

Which means Chris Larrigan may have many more shots at fame—and a $57,000 fortune—producing rap videos for everybody’s favorite ketchup.

Q&

A

WILL.I.AM HAS nothing on Ben

Relles.

The lead singer for The Black Eyed Peas, Am entered briefly into presi- dential politics during the 2008 election cycle with his

Yes We Can music video

endorsing Barack Obama long before that seemed anything like a sure thing.

But Ben Relles, a then- unknown, thirty-two-year- old account executive at Internet advertising firm