ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com
Blended CGM: Cheerioke, Anyone!

As I've noted in the last few posts, expect to see a surge of new marketing campaigns anchored to core insights driving the consumer-generated media revolution. They will cover the full spectrum of activity, from 100% organic (no marketer prompting or control) to high-levels of marketer control (with a sprinking of consumer feedback or co-creation) involved. To build on the General Motors example I wrote about earlier, I just received an e-mail from Oddcast, a firm specializing in avatars, promoting a Cheerios-sponsored campaign that allows users to co-create with the brand their own Cheerioke. Although this falls into the "blended" or "remixed" category of CGM, the campaign, like the Chevy Tahoe example, allows consumers to integrate their own content into pre-defined avatar templates. What's especially interesting here is they make it really simple to overlay a voice recording into final avatar product. You can offer audio directly through your computer microphone or call a simple 800-number that will immediately integrate that recording into your avatar. Yes, at the end of the day, this is advertising, but the sheer number of customized renderings of the ad content is what we should be paying attention to. This is also a very high order of consumer "engagement." At the ARF conference the past few days, the ARF put out a document providing further definition on "engagement" as (borrowing from Harvard Business School consumer understanding expert Gerald Zaltman) the "co-creation of meaning." There's an element of that in this campaign. And believe me, for better or for worse, we'll be seeing much more of this.