NEW YORK What do you get when a 93-year-old packaged-goods pioneer partners with a 93-day-old user-created advertising pioneer? In the case of Lance and social video platform ViTrue, it's "Lance in My Pants" as a viral campaign.
The initiative, which builds on the Charlotte, N.C.-based snack-maker's radio campaign of three years starring Comedy Central host Adam Corolla, invites consumers to upload their own "I Got Lance in My Pants!" commercials at lance.com and ViTrue's user-generated ad site, sharkle.com.
"The goal is to contemporize the brand," said Lance vice president of marketing Todd Phillips. "Tradition and heritage reinforce the quality perception, but we want to make sure that the brand maintains its relevancy to young consumers, so we have to do things that are bold and powerful."
Qualifying the effort as "un-Lance-like," Phillips said the home of brands such as Toastchee, Thunder, Captain's Wafers and Gold N Chees only built a Web site in 2000. Four years later it stepped up its digital marketing with audio and video e-postcards, and more recently, with ring-tone downloads.
"Lance is a very traditional company with a retro image that's come into vogue," said ViTrue CEO Reggie Bradford. "It's a natural fit for us‹the whole vision for ViTrue is to be a safe place for brands."
The Atlanta-based startup offers marketers a platform for interacting with consumers, from supplying tools for vetting, editing, green lighting and launching user-created ad campaigns to making available specs for popular mash-ups.
"What ViTrue does is put guard rails around user-generated advertising so it may become less cacophonous," said Tim Hanlon, senior vice president of ventures, Denuo.
Said Bradford: "We offer safeguards and protections, so Lance gets approval of what gets uploaded, and we have tools in place so that consumers are only participating with copy-protected material."
ViTrue's budding client roster includes Sony Pictures and Moe's Southwest Grill.
A veteran of Miller Brewing, WebMD and N2 Broadband, Bradford approached Lance this spring, at a time when it was seeking to expand into user-generated video advertising but was unsure of how to proceed. What recommended ViTrue, per Phillilps, was its "combination of the ability to rate [submissions], the amount of hits they were getting on their site and the right tools with the right attitude."
Phillips concluded that sharkle.com's teen and 20-something community was an optimal match for Lance's target demographic of 18-49-year-old males "on the go" (with a secondary emphasis on female grocery shoppers). "It blew my mind‹I was on it half the night," he said.
Phillips' "perfect scenario" for the campaign‹which will feature monthly contests and prizes‹is to draw young consumers to lance.com, where they can engage with the brand and shop online.
Said Bradford, "We're in the very early stages of ushering in the new era of one-to-one marketing where companies like Lance can build personality and emotion around their brands in a way that only video can deliver with the targeting capabilities of the Web."
NEW YORK A new company is looking to tap public creativity with a platform for brands to collect consumer-generated video ads.
Atlanta-based ViTrue has $2.2 million in backing from General Catalyst Partners and former WebMD CMO Reggie Bradford, who is CEO of ViTrue. It has acquired video-sharing site Sharkle.com, which it plans to use to connect amateur producers with big brands.
"In many cases, they're going to have more success than any individual creative would," Bradford said. "The vision is to get brands more involved [in consumer-generated content] and allow them to tap into this in a more meaningful and powerful way."
Sharkle.com, which launched about six months ago, attracts 1 million users a month, according to the company. It will continue to operate a video-sharing site, only it will offer creators the opportunity to participate in a marketplace for video ads. ViTrue provides a video ad-production platform that includes brand assets and consumer-creation tools. Sharkle users will rate the ads.
In its first promotion, ViTrue helped Sony Pictures attract "thousands" of video submissions for The Benchwarmers of users depicting their experiences as nerds. While Sony does not plan on using those videos as ads on other sites, Bradford believes future pushes will entail brands using creative both online and in mass media.
"We do think there's going to be great creative that will pass the test and be of good enough quality to run on television," he said.
Bradford said ViTrue would eventually offer amateur creators financial incentives for ads created.
"Our goal is to take this video site and create a business model where folks can make money on it," he said.
Anick Jesdanun writes that sharing of amateur video grows online and promises to be as commonplace as photo sharing. Jesdanun goes onto ponder other questions.
Another gray area involves music playing in the background. “If you are lip-synching a Prince song , do you owe Prince royalties to that?” asked Trevor Wright, chief executive of the Sharkle, Inc. video site. “The industry needs to and will begin to figure these things out.”
There’s also great interest among advertisers. A news site can produce only so much video on its own, Wright said, but user generated content is limitless, driven by personal ego: “People want to share things they’ve done, places they’ve been, creations they’ve made and so forth.”
"Blogs took off because people have something to say," says Trevor Wright, 34, Sharkle's founder. "Now, with video on blogs, we're finding that some of these amateur videographers are also pretty darn good."
Ian Schafer writes Video-sharing communities are popping up all over the place, with big players (Google Video) and upstarts (Vimeo, Sharkle) alike clamoring for market share. Although most video on many of these services are user-submitted, corporate content producers are a-comin'. They'll eventually upload their content into these indexing services to make them more easily findable by consumers searching for video. What we're looking at are vast repositories of online video delivered when you want it.
"LowerMyBills, Nextag and DeVry University are already advertising on the site. I imagine that with Sharkle's young and media-savvy demographic, advertisers in the electronics, retail, entertainment, and consumer packaged goods industries, for example, will be getting involved soon," says Rebecca Weeks, iMedia Summit content director.
The next wave of evolution for TV will involve consumers making their content available through more devices (this current shift is about the publishers distributing their content, but we know the Web is a self-publishing medium and consumers always finds a way to have their voice heard). Right now there are many sites online where users can express themselves and share their ideas; from MySpace and Friendster to Sharkle and YouTube. Over the coming years, we'll likely see "old-fashioned" TV adopt ways for users to broadcast their content into the living room (formerly the domain of the TV set). Imagine when any of these properties start creating video-on-demand stations through traditional cable!
