With American Idol turning everyday singers into pop stars and YouTube bringing acclaim to wannabe filmmakers, it seems only fitting that Super Bowl advertisers would be the latest to embrace the trend of giving amateurs a shot at the big time.
This year a number of advertisers, including Doritos, Chevrolet and even the National Football League itself, held contests for creating ads or ideas for ads to run in the year's biggest showcase for US advertising.
At a reported average price of US$2.6 million for a 30-second spot during the national championship football game, which airs on Feb. 4 on CBS Corp's CBS network, taking a chance on an amateur is not for the faint of heart.
The NFL and Chevy are taking out some of the uncertainty by bringing in professional talent to make the ideas generated by contestants into finished ads.
Doritos, however, said it would air an ad from one of five finalists that was made entirely by the contestants.
Ann Mukherjee, vice president for marketing at PepsiCo Inc's Frito-Lay unit, which makes Doritos, said the submitted ads have not been edited "one iota."
"Any big gain is going to take a lot of risk, and we went in with our eyes wide open," said Mukherjee. "It was really an effort to give our consumers control over their brand in an age where consumers really want a voice over what they love."
By reaching out to consumers, advertisers are embracing the latest buzz topic in the media and entertainment business: "user-generated content," a phenomenon that has many worried that people will spend more time watching YouTube or hanging out on MySpace than reading magazines, going to the movies or spending time with other traditional media.
Doritos solicited submissions online for its contest and got more than 1,000 entries. The five finalists' ads were put online for a popular vote. The winning ad will not be revealed until it airs during the Super Bowl.
The finalists -- and their entourages, for those who have them -- are being flown to Miami to watch the game from a sports bar facility. Each finalist also received US$10,000.
Joe Herbert, one finalist, said his spot, which features a creative use of duct tape to keep a roommate from stealing the protagonist's Doritos, cost him and his brother Dave "a little bit of money and a lot of sleep."
General Motor Corp's Chevrolet, meanwhile, ran a contest for college students to submit ideas for ads. Five teams were flown to Chevrolet's professional marketing division for an "advertising boot camp" to make their plans into real commercials, Chevy spokesman Travis Parman said.
The students got to see a big-time advertising operation up close, and the car maker got valuable insights into what kinds of messages work with 18 to 25 year olds, the target audience for several Chevy models and a notoriously difficult age group to reach through mainstream media.
To solicit submissions, Chevrolet went to where it thought ambitious marketing students would be hanging out -- ad industry blogs, including www.JaffeJuice.com, www.AdRants.com and MIT's Advertising Lab blog.
At the NFL, the league held a series of events last fall where fans would come in and "pitch" an ad idea to a panel of experts.
The pitches, some 2,000, ranged from "funny to very serious to poignant to wacky," NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said.
Gino Bona, a former sales director at a marketing firm, won with an idea about the loss that fans feel at the end of the pro football season. Professional producers are shooting the ad this week in Los Angeles.
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