Power to the People!

It seems a hot trend these days is customer created advertising. Mastercard has been running its "Fill in the Blanks" priceless ad since the Oscars last week and has created a lot of buzz.

The ad asks viewers to visit priceless.com, where they can fill in the blanks as part of a contest. Winning words will appear in an ad televised later this year. While customers can create the words the agency is still controlling the images.

Likewise, Chevrolet is following up an appearance on this week’s Apprentice tv show with a contest inviting people to create their own spots for Chevy Tahoe. Visitors to chevyapprentice.com can win prizes for creating the winning 30-second spot for the Tahoe. Much like the Mastercard ads, Chevy's agency is providing the visuals and soundtrack and asking participants to provide their own copy.

While Mastercard and GM are dipping their toes in the co-creation waters to view the future turn your dial to Current TV.

Recenly Sony, Toyota and L’Oreal have connected with Current in a way that represents the future of co-created marketing. If the speech I heard from Anne Zehren, Current's president-sales and marketing, at the Boston Ad Club’s The Changing Face of Marketing Symposium is any indication these new relationships are going to rock the agency world. In her speech Zehren said, “Marketers grow up being brand guardians -- here’s the handbook, here’s the logo, here’s how we use it. Marketers now have to be brand hosts.”

The question is: can agencies make the transition?

To get a peak at of the future, check out the Sony ad that Tyson Ibele, a 19-year-old from Minneapolis, created last November. Ibele made the spot to help him get a job at a production company called, Make. He then posted the spot to his personal Web site. After the video became an internet hit Current tracked Ibele down. Current then showed the ad to marketing executives at Sony as an example of the future of marketing. They were blown away.

As Mike Fasulo, Sony’s chief marketing officer, told Advertising Age recently, “Agencies beware. It’s a great reinvention. ... These are the folks we want to tap into speaking to each other -- let’s put them to work on their terms, not ours.”

As I said in Beyond the Brand, “In this new era beyond the brand, it is the creative citizens of a community — the people and the brands — that will survive and thrive by co-creating from the bottom-up.”

Your customers are out there right now, playing with your brand. Their power is growing. What are you going to do?