Whatever the value of user-created content, the pros are not going away. Agencies and in-house staff may no longer have a monopoly on talent, technology and expertise, but paid production (not to mention strategy and planning) still has its advantages, and will be around for awhile.

Yet regular folks can play an important role with professionally produced ads, too. Television spots and straight-to-the-Web video clips can reach broad online audiences when fans choose to distribute them via e-mail or sites like YouTube. There is a word-of-mouth aspect to this kind of distribution, with people recommending clips to friends or members of social networks, and viewers choosing to watch. "You push traditional advertising at the consumer and hope they find it engaging, and that they are interested in your product or service," says Dilworth. "When a friend recommends something, you pay attention." And Web diffusion is free, or virtually so.

Burger King makes this kind of clip-sharing easy for anyone to do. The Web site of the world's No. 2 burger chain invites visitors to view several offbeat television ads, which include characters like anthropomorphic burgers, talking chickens with attitude, and the giant-headed king himself. The words "Send to a Friend" appear beneath the ads as they play; click on that link and an e‑mail form pops up, with "Your friend sent you an invitation to the BK Cinema" in the subject line and the URL for the clip library in the e-mail body, along with the familiar catchphrase, "Have it your way."

Another ad, for a beverage line called Smirnoff Raw Tea, has become something of an online phenomenon, with 1.6 million page views at the YouTube site alone. The spot, a gangsta-rap spoof featuring preppies and their not-so-hard-knock lives, owes a lot to another YouTube hit, the "Lazy Sunday" video from Saturday Night Live (that video, also a rap parody, became a Web sensation and single-handedly boosted SNL's coolness quotient). Smirnoff, made by $18 billion, London-based Diageo PLC, put its clip on a company Web site, then watched as it took on a life of its own via e-mail and viral adoption—all without any cost to the company beyond the original $200,000 production budget.

But Smirnoff may not have gone far enough, said marketing consultant Virginia Miracle. Writing in August at the corporate blog of Brains on Fire, a national naming and identity firm based in Greenville, S.C., Miracle, the company's director of word-of-mouth marketing, says Smirnoff should have made room for feedback and suggestions on the campaign at its own site. "Essentially, they asked me to come by for a visit and then didn't receive me as a guest," she writes. "Rude....Despite the video piece's popularity, the campaign could fail still." Smirnoff had no additional comment.

Campbell-Ewald worked on a similar "alt-distribution" scheme for an online campaign it created for Little Rock, Ark.-based telecom Alltel Corp., which made use of blog advertising and networks like MySpace. Dilworth says a successful viral spot can turn into a huge return on investment for the advertiser, but that creating such a spot remains more of an art than a science.

"The standards are much higher than in traditional television advertising," he says. "The old standard is that you have the money to run it, and it has something good for the brand in it. But for an online ad to succeed it has to be stunning, or at least really entertaining, or offer clear value in the form of things like coupons, or contain valuable information," Dilworth says.

Marketers can think of their communications strategy much as they would an investment portfolio, he says. There are safer bets with lower returns, and then riskier plays with big potential payoffs. "Customer distribution can make something into a home run," Dilworth adds. "You need some of those over time to get the higher return you seek."

Be sure to also check out the sidebar: Beware of Blogs

1 | 2 | 3 | 4