Student's Ad Gets a Remake, and Makes the Big Time
The idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to — paraphrasing the company's old slogan a bit — think differently.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's move to remake a student's spot into an official campaign caps a year of the company treating marketing itself as a product: USA Today profiled Apple's unusually polished marketing operation back in March, and by summer the iPhone buzz machine had shown how much value unpaid enthusiasm can carry for a brand.
The Times had already flagged the catch in consumer-generated advertising in May, when it examined the high price of creating free ads — the labor and cost amateurs absorb for a shot at exposure. Today's story flips that framing: instead of a contest dangling a prize, Apple is taking finished amateur work and giving it professional distribution, which is why the non-professionals-can-make-good-commercials idea is described as spreading widely.
First-order effects
- The student creator gets the industry's biggest prize — a national commercial built from their idea with professional resources behind it — while Apple acquires validated creative at a fraction of agency development cost.
- Advertising professionals reading the piece confront direct evidence that a non-professional's concept can clear Apple's famously demanding bar for brand work.
Second-order effects
- Rival brands now face pressure to build intake channels for amateur creative rather than relying solely on agencies, since Apple has demonstrated a working model for harvesting it.
- Agencies risk being repositioned from idea originators to production and finishing shops, as the expensive upstream ideation step gets crowdsourced for free.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, brand advertising splits into a curator model — companies sourcing and polishing outsider ideas — and the traditional commissioned-campaign model, with compensation norms for amateur contributors still unresolved as the May reporting on free-ad costs suggests.
- Consumer-generated content moves from stunt and contest format toward standing infrastructure inside marketing departments, changing whose taste ultimately shapes mass-media campaigns.
The trend: Consumer-generated content is maturing from novelty contests into a real supply chain for mainstream brand advertising, with Apple positioning itself as its most credible corporate adopter.