Note To Barry Diller: Consumer Content Takes Centerstage - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBlogger

A long time ago, at a conference far far away... I had this very strange run-in with Barry Diller. It was NATPE 1998, and I was on the show floor with his entire team from Studios USA. We'd just spent the better part of a year preparing to launch a nationwide series called Free Speech America. It was to be the first User-Generated daily series, a syndicated show targeted at 7pm.

Diller had spent almost a million dollars on the pilot and associated marketing expenses. I was to be the Executive Producer and the series Creator. And we were ready to set the world on its ear.

I'd never met Diller. Until that moment.

He walked up to me. "So, you're the 'real people videos guy'" he said.

Me: "Yes, this is my show," or some other somewhat innocuous answer.

He: "Well, good luck. Real People aren't that interesting."

Me: "Umm, thanks."

That was more than ten years ago. He was right - at the time. Hollywood owned entertainment. Real people didn't have the tools, the bandwidth or the audience.

That was then. This is now. Times change.

Wow.

I've just spent the past two hours watching as many of the 250 submissions to the Win Your Fantasy Bicycle Contest as I could get through. You read that right - 250 submissions.

Hmm... hey Barry, it may be time to rethink the place for real folks in the emerging Content Cloud eco-system.

What you can see if you look at the three videos above are extraordinary examples of folks who have access to brand new tools. Tools like computer animation, Photoshop, and even the musical tools required to score your own rap video.

What does this mean for magazines? Well, for one, talented readers are now content creators.

What does this mean for advertising agencies? It means that embracing passionate customers and including them in the brand messaging is essential to embrace authenticity and engage in passion-based marketing.

And that's just the start of it. It's far more important to give customers a platform than it is to force feed them your marketing message. For example, Zappos.tv, which clearly finds ways to open its brand and its message to users, is finding that inviting customers to play with its brand can result in some pretty remarkable high-quality short films, like this one:

And here's what the makers of the Zappos film "Guest Of Honor" have to say about the filmmaking process.

So, although Barry was certainly right 11 years ago, it was just too early. The content

creation revolution is now clearly upon us.

Viewers are makers. Fans share. Brands embrace contributed creative or become antiquated.

Content is the coin of the realm.

It's incredibly exciting to see the quality of these contributions - and imagine a world in which

contributed content expands to become an essential and embraced part of how brands

and companies engage their audiences.

If what I've seen on the drawing boards comes true in the next 6 months, the evolution of

consumer created content could take center stage far sooner that you might imagine.

Hey Barry, maybe we should dust off the Free Speech pilot? What do you think?

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well know innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net