Carl Jr. & User Generated Content

• Thursday, 11 June 2009
• By Catheryn York
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User Generated Content (UGC) is a real buzz word among marketers and agencies so I thought Id give you an example of it in action. For their new Portobello Mushroom Six-Dollar Burger ad campaign, Carl Jr. will use UGC from popular YouTube faces. This is not the first time they have thought outside the box or tried something risky (remember the Paris Hilton car wash).

In this campaign Carl’s Jr. has used nine YouTube celebrities who combined have 3.8 million YouTube subscribers, 590,000 followers on Twitter and 25,000 Facebook fans (according to Adweek). Thats a whole lot of audience to reach.

In implemeting this campaign Carl’s Jr. only brief to the YouTube stars was to mention the burger, tell viewers how they eat their burgers, and then pose the question to the viewers. This freedom allowed the YouTube stars to do the video in their fashion to reach their audience, while encouraging viewers to take part in the fun with a video response of their own truly making this a social campaign.

Now lets look at the ripple effect this could have...firstly viewers will willingly watch these video ads. Secondly, there is a good chance that viewers will then watch the other YouTube celebs’ videos (That equates to nine watched Carl’s Jr. ads per user!). Thirdly, they will then compare and discuss the ads amongst themselves. And finally some will create and distribute their own video responses...I think the you get the picture.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of this campaign and will keep you posted...in the meantime have a look at the ads yourself.