Yahoo invites its users to shoot ads

Yahoo (YHOO) first encouraged consumers to create blogs and photo pages with text and pictures. Now, the Internet portal wants them to make advertisements, too.

On Monday, 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. There is no cash reward, nor even a prize for best ad. But Yahoo hopes the enthusiasm of its customers will result in great work. 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.

Other companies have experimented with user-generated ads. Earlier this year, Chevrolet asked people to take snippets of video footage and pictures on its website to create ads for an SUV. The site was later removed when it was hijacked by anti-SUV activists.

Olivo says anything goes at Yahoo, as long as people don't violate copyright and abide by Yahoo's usage rules, relating to language and sexual content.

Charlene Li, an analyst at market tracker Forrester Research, doesn't see user-generated ads having the same sort of popularity as photo sharing. "This really requires you to put some energy and effort into it," she says. But for people who want to star in an ad and send it to friends and family, "It's a great way for them to be creative."