User Generated Content

Robin Sloan - VP of Strategy, Current TV

So people say "user generated content, UGC" and often you get the sense that I think that's one monolithic thing."Well yeah, we need some UGC. Everybody wants UGC now." The truth is, like a lot of things in media, it's a whole ecosystem and there's everything from a semi-professional blogger, somebody who has deep, deep expertise in some topic like law, economics, science, who decides they're going to take it upon themselves to sort of be a almost citizen expert on this and share their ideas with the world. The other end of the extreme there's a citizen journalist who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. They see a plane crash, they take a picture with their camera phone, they upload that to the Internet. Those are both user-generated content but those are very different people in very different situations and even in-between that there's a lot of variety and a lot of variation.

Matt York - Founder, VideoMaker magazine

You can go in to Wal-Mart and buy a digital camcorder for maybe a hundred bucks, maybe less, little digital camcorder that has no tape in it and from that camcorder you can upload to YouTube. So it's somewhat miraculous that you have this enormous production capability and this enormous distribution capability. So really we have finally arrived at a level of democratization of mass media that I never dreamed of.

David Gale - VP of New Media, MTV

And so sort of all of a sudden shake up the system and you've got user-generated content as important to a young viewer as produced content, as professional content. It's really kind of daunting.

Matt York

We're all grappling with that. That TV networks are grappling with that. The advertising community's grappling with that.

Jeff Goodby - Co-Chairman, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Well you know, a lot of my clients think it's total baloney but, I have to tell you that this year for Frito-Lay, for Doritos, we held, we created a user-generated Web site where people could post ads they'd created for Doritos purportedly to go on the Super Bowl. If you could get your ad voted as number one on this Website and then Doritos ran it on the Super Bowl and if it beat all the other ads in the USA Today ad-meter, there was a million dollar prize. So two guys from Indiana actually did this. They posted an ad, it got voted number one, it went to the Super Bowl, it won the Super Bowl, and these two guys have been on Letterman and everything, got a million dollars for it. So it's a, you can go on and see it, it's a great ad. It's terrifically done. But it's amateurish enough to be charming. And it beat a lot of very advertising agencies, including ours.

Robin Sloan

The whole notion behind Current is that it's user created. Our community, our audience can participate at all the different parts of the network and produce it themselves. This actually also applies to the advertising. We have something called "viewer created advertising" where we sign up big sponsors, you know, Sony, Toyota, L'Oreal, big companies to essentially sponsor a user-generated advertising program. They put out a creative brief, our users read it, come up with idea if they're interested. They submit thirty-second spots for TV. The community votes on the ones they like best. The sponsor eventually picks the one that they'd like to represent them and then that is what airs as their commercial on Current TV.