“Insider Voice” offers expert perspectives from our team on key trends and challenges in media and advertising. Through this series, you’ll gain actionable insights and forward-thinking predictions on topics ranging from AdTech advancements to the impact of emerging technologies on audience engagement and revenue models.
Unlock the Value of User Generated Content
User Generated Content, or UGC, represents a huge portion of the internet. From TikTok and Instagram to Reddit and Quora, UGC reigns supreme across much of the internet. Not only is it popular, it’s also very trusted. Authentic UGC has been found to be the most trusted type of content, period. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Google search results have started to rank UGC higher, often defaulting to question and answer forums and fan sites more than expert content. This often means that UGC content gets a lot of traffic.
Despite the high trust and popularity of UGC, advertisers can be a bit more wary. Save for the walled gardens, which provide unique targeting capabilities, many of the UGC forums online don’t command the same CPMs as other premium media sites. Advertisers tend to prefer highly controlled editorial content complete with images and a branded layout. This can be frustrating for companies with a lot of UGC, who want to package their content and command premium prices.
Luckily for UGC media companies, there are a number of innovations and solutions that can help, including AI and new forms of targeting as well as unique sales strategies.
AI Unlocks Value in UGC
One problem with UGC is that it’s hard to organize. People start new threads, abandon conversations, and repeat themselves. Unlike a neat list of videos or articles, a UGC site has a lot of content variety. UGC can also veer from positive and helpful to negative or simply boring. Advertisers can be nervous about advertising against the less-than-awesome content elements on a UGC site.
Media companies can harness the power of AI to get more from their UGC. Using AI, it’s possible to analyze and organize content – even merging conversations or eliminating dead ends to clean things up. AI can also be used in many ways to drive value. It can help make recommendations to visitors to help them navigate the site and drive traffic to higher value areas, and it can help media companies analyze and evaluate audiences across different content topics to see where there is opportunity.
Media companies can also create new ad products to sell to brands that rely on generative AI to “read” and analyze content. Companies like Hearst have an AI tool called Aura that can package audiences based on sentiment, giving advertisers new way to target. For example, a movie fan site can use a similar AI tool to mind UGC across all of their content to find people who have certain mindsets, regardless of what movies they are writing about. A brand might want to target people who like to experiment and try new things. Using AI, the site can find content that has that sentiment, regardless of what the actual movie topic is. AI fundamentally gives UGC sites a new layer of targeting that can help advertisers reach the right people much more precisely and effectively.
AI Fundamentally gives UGC sites a new layer of targeting that can help advertisers reach the right people much more precisely and effectively.
Showcasing UGC Ad Opportunities in Private Marketplaces
For UGC media companies, the goal is to show advertisers the true value of such highly trusted content, which requires some creativity and education. It can be difficult for UGC media companies to package their content in ways that command premium prices in the open market. Programmatic advertisers are either only focused on reaching a specific audience or they don’t place a premium on the UGC content. With the right approach, UGC media companies can package and sell their products more effectively when they use private marketplace deals.
Media companies can curate specific audiences and topics using AI, and even create packages that deliver certain levels of engagement. A private marketplace helps the UGC company elevate their content and showcase the trusted element of their offering. As advertisers become more comfortable with UGC as a premium advertising option, they will then become more open to paying the right price on the open web.
UGC is trusted by consumers, and with the right approach, can be trusted by advertisers, too.
