Amateur advertising

A comment piece in Forbes Magazine offers an advertising expert's take on the amateur ads in the Superbowl.

Then I saw something that convinced me that indeed the inmates had taken over the asylum. It seems that amateurs (Us) are set to tackle some Super Bowl ads this year. That's right: Some marketers, including the National Football League and Doritos, are running Internet contests enabling consumer-generated advertising to appear in what is costing $2.6 million a spot in this year's Super Bowl.

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This brings us to the role of the advertising agency that is preparing that 30-second message for which you've paid $2.6 million to buy 30 seconds of airtime to expose. To me, they should be about dramatizing that differentiating idea. Whether it's finding a gecko to pitch your online insurance pitch (Geico) or whatever, it all has to start with your positioning strategy.

That said--what does "Us" know about all that? We'll just come up with some form of clever commercial that probably will not include a reason to buy the product over the competitor's product. It will be the kind of commercial that will elicit the response of "what are they selling?"

I wonder what he says, after seeing the ads.