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Yahoo Taps Into User Generated Video Ads

USA Today reports that Yahoo first encouraged consumers to create blogs and photo pages with text and pictures. Now, the Internet portal wants them to make advertisements, too.

Today, Yahoo touts a new look for its front page by asking people to pull out the video camera, open up the editing software and create 12-second commercials for Yahoo. The ads will be shown at video.yahoo.com. Yahoo Vice President Allen Olivo says user-generated advertising is just another way of having customers do testimonials for the site.

"Any advertiser or business that isn't maximizing the power of what users have to say is crazy," he says. "The brand belongs to the customer. Who better to express what we're all about than them?"

To kick off the campaign, Yahoo enlisted students from four art schools � Yale, San Francisco Art Institute, Parsons School of Design and London Film Academy � to create ads, with scripts written by Yahoo's advertising agency, OgilivyOne.

IMHO, anyone who launches this kind of consumer-driven creative experiment, but then limits themselves to predictable scripts written by a legacy ad agency that still believes in "Customer Ownership" is beyond crazy.

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