Abstract

This Master’s Thesis takes its starting point in a new type of advertising, User Generated Ad-vertising, originated in the U.S. about eight years ago. As the name indicates, the commercials are made by users instead of being produced by professional advertising agencies. This type of advertising mainly occurred because more and more – especially technology smart – peo-ple no longer seem convinced by traditional advertising and consider the commercials as an annoying factor. For that reason some U.S. companies got a new idea: Why not let consumers make their own commercials? The idea was based on the belief that the consumers would produce a content which they found relevant, entertaining and reliable. At the same time the company (which launched the campaign) and its products would hopefully gain more authenticity. Because of the technological development and consumer spending, most people are nowadays equipped with either digital cameras or camera phones, and therefore the idea is now a reality.

The thesis is based on an interest in this new type of marketing and focuses on both consum-ers and company – where the emphasis is on the Danish milk chocolate company Cocio. The thesis is therefore based on the following question:

How is user generated
advertising a contributing factor in Cocio’s marketing?

The survey is based on a user generated competition from 2009 called Vis os din indre Cocio. The campaign was unfolded on the Internet in a specially designed Cocio community created for user generated content only.
Since the consumers generate the content for these campaigns, the first part of the sur-vey deals with the Internet users – what type of Internet user is involved in these creative campaigns and why? The questions are interesting in the context of increasing personal pro-motion that takes place, for example on social networks like Facebook and on entertainment networks like YouTube. These questions have been answered based on topics such as motivation theory, lifestyle and Internet culture.
The second part of the survey concerns the analysis of the consumers’ contribution to the campaign. The user generated video contributions are analyzed through a hermeneutic approach and the videos are perceived on the basis of cinematic tools focusing on identifica-tion between the characters in the video and the receiver – an aspect which is to influence the recipient thus, roughly spoken, he or she remembers Cocio’s chocolate milk instead of competing brands. The results of the analysis gave plausible arguments to part three of the task, in which the videos’ actual contribution to Cocio’s advertising communication is discussed.