This article in Saturday's New York Times says that running contests in which customers create ads doesn't save the client any money, doesn't take work away from agencies, and - in the case of the Heinz "Top This!" challenge - results in a lot of awful ads.

On first reading, I wondered who the heck ever thought that these contests would be less expensive than a normal campaign. It turns out that it's the customers themselves. Some of them feel that the invitation to create content is a Tom Sawyeresque ruse to trick them into doing work that Heinz is too lazy and cheap to do itself.


Fig. 1 - "Does a boy get a chance to create user-generated media every day?"

However hard it is to create an ad professionally, it's got to be better than wading through hundreds of mediocre commercials on YouTube.

Check out these submissions on YouTube and decide for yourself.


Fig. 2 - Imagine the deadly silence in the conference room if you presented this to a client. It chills the blood, it does.