The High Price of Creating Free Ads
From an advertiser's perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work. — But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one day after the Journal's Advertising's Brave New World framed the shift of creative work toward the public, making the Times piece the skeptical counterweight: Heinz's contest invited anyone to produce its commercials, with winners chosen by judges rather than by craft.
The confirmed detail that matters is what showed up instead of polished spots — YouTube submissions of questionable quality — which turns 'free ads' into a screening problem for the brand.
First-order effects
- H. J. Heinz now has to review and filter a stream of weak public submissions before any of it can touch its brand, trading agency fees for moderation burden.
- Control over Heinz's messaging moves, entry by entry, from its agency to anonymous creators posting directly to YouTube.
Second-order effects
- Rival advertisers watching the contest have to price the real cost of crowdsourced creative — not production, but selection — before copying the format.
- Agencies gain a sales argument: curation and taste as the service brands discover they still need when the public does the drafting.
Third-order effects
- If contest-style campaigns spread, ad production splits between open submission at the bottom and professional editing/filtering at the top — a structure where platforms like YouTube hold the supply and brands hold the risk.
The trend: Consumer-generated advertising is moving from cheap-labor novelty toward brand-controlled pipelines where the hard part shifts from making ads to filtering them.