Up with Humans!

You know what the great thing about the world is?

Humans.

If you don’t like humans, or think they’re annoying, please stop reading. If their smell bothers you on the El, or the way they slurp their soup too loudly at Panera makes you want to put headphones on, you are excused.

Because I think humans are awesome, I say, “Up with people!”

One of the great things about humans is, they come up with amazing ideas. They think up things like the theory of relativity and the Flowbee (800 watts of stylish suction).

The guy who sells me my teriyaki chicken has ideas about a lot of things, some good, some bad; his recent ideas were around Chicago’s July 4 fireworks and how more people could see them (make ‘em bigger and higher!”).

A few years ago, the marketing world realized the value of humans and the power of their ideas and became an enabler to the development of User Created Content, also known as Consumer Generated Content. In other words, marketing communications that’s created by regular humans instead of professional marketers.

It’s some of the very best marketing communications out there. Here’s a very recent example. And here’s one of my favorites, a TV commercial created by real humans and voted by humans to be the best Super Bowl ad of 2009—and which helped coin the temporarily famous headline, “Two nobodies from nowhere.” Good stuff, don’t you think? You gotta love real human ideation.

One reason humans usually like Consumer Generated Content so much may be because it’s created by real humans. It doesn't have to jump over the many hurdles like an idea created by real marketers, such as focus group testing and rounds and rounds of revisions, so it hasn't had to have too many changes along the way, and the idea is often closer to what it originally looked like. The work may not always be as strategic as ideas that go through rounds of focus groups, but other humans sure seem to like it.

Just think if real humans created all of the marketing communications. It might be marketing anarchy. But it sure would be fun.