User-Generated Advertising?
There's been some interesting discussion amongst the blogging event folks regarding the notion of "user-generated advertising". It started last week when Brian Dear (of eventful.com) mentioned that BusinessWeek had picked up a phrase that he was loosely using (user-generated advertisers).
Brian goes on to define it define it as such:
The idea behind user-generated advertisers is this: everyone gets the power of user-generated content, but why stop at content? Why not help members of a local community to find those elusive local merchant advertisers every web company in the universe is seeking right now? The Holy Grail of advertising on the web is the local merchant -- the local merchant who spends lots of money on coupons, classifieds, radio, tv, print -- all the old 20th century solutions -- everything but ads on the Net. And this just Won't Do.
So enlist the public in finding these merchants, signing them up, helping them be successful. Give them a finder's fee commission, and help usher in the great new age of ads on the web: from the local car dealer, pizza parlor, hair salon, hardware store, department store, grocery store, you name it. User-generated advertisers: the wave of the future.
So, going on that, it's in the arena of something like AdWords for local search - except by the people. Well, not exactly. I've done more than my share of selling in my time. I'll tell you that, considering I can't get the average user to fill in a simple form completely, without errors, and that the majority of people I know have a hard time talking to strangers and almost everyone I know has a problem asking for money (even when it's owed them), that this simply won't work.
Pete Caputa made a direct, but funny comment: "I think its called sponsorship. And generally, anyone that amasses a crowd of people can sell it. And if you have a history of being able to gather a crowd, sponsors solicit you." More importantly, Pete goes on to discuss this a bit further:
From my experience, proactively selling sponsorship is difficult. It requires a dedicated salesperson. It is equivalent to selling offline advertising because it is difficult to measure effectiveness. We actually hired someone to sell sponsorship for about six months. We broke even and parted amicably. Ironically, now a lot of local people contact us about sponsorsing local events. Luckily, I don't have to plan them. And passing on a sponsor to a customer usually covers the cost of our services. So, I definitely see business opportunity in aggregating events, understanding which events are attracting what audiences, and facilitating sponsorship sales. But, calling it "user generated" is a stretch.
Source: pc4media, "How To Monetize Participative [Amateur] Conferences"
I know Pete's worked hard at selling this stuff. If you trust anyone's opinion on the matter, it should be his.
Another buddy, Chris Heurer (of BrainJams), chimes in from a different angle, the organizer's:
When user generated content, meets user generated conferences, meets user generated advertising, wonderful things can happen... and that is one of the keys to the success of BrainJams.
I have a lot more to say about Chris' other comments in that post, but I'll be saving those for another day. For now, I'll summarize my understanding as such. Though we're getting increasing involvement from the attendee in the marketing and promotion, and occassionally investment, in events, there's still a fine line between a supporter (donates) and an advertiser (buys). The traditional event business (and world) has established meanings for these terms and muddying the waters with the user-generated prefix, though fun, interesting, and certainly TwoDotOhNo-compliant, can certainly lead to all sorts of confusion.
P.S. I don't think Brian was necessarily trying to coin a new phrase either
P.S.S. Thanks to Chris and Pete for their props and support.