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The phenomenon of user-created content, or UCC, has caught the attention of businesses seeking new ways to reach out to consumers. A wave of amateur -- or at least amateur-style -- homemade video clips that promote products and services is washing over the online retail scene.
The promotional clips are called SCCs, for seller-created content, meaning they were made as advertisements by a company selling goods or services. The trend has even prompted the development of spin-off businesses that offer services to help businesses or individuals create their own SCCs, such as professional SCC models and SCC shopping hosts.
Computer programmer Han Kyun-duk and his video-producer friend Hong Sa-yoon set up a company called GGPAD that makes on-line advertisements in the form of video clips. After the duo are hired by a company looking for promotion, they write a script suited to the product, shoot a quick movie, edit it together and post it online.
They star in the video clips and explain the product, just like shopping hosts on cable shopping channels, but with a bit more humor and a more relaxed style. In one famous clip, Han and Hong hosted a short segment for an online game machine in their pajamas. The clip, called ˇ°Pajama Showˇ±, was posted on an online shopping mall where more than 10,000 viewers watched it in just one week.
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Hong Sa-yoon (left) and Han Kyun-duk, the founders of video-clip producing company GGPAD, explain an on-line game machine in their pajamas in one of their popular videos.
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Thanks to a lot of positive word-ofˇ©-mouth, GGPAD is now swamped with work, with more than four times the number of jobs in February than it had last month.
The medium has even spawned its own modeling stars. The online clothing company Clubber chose Yoon Seo-na to dance in their wares in a sexy clip called ˇ°Wave Girl.ˇ± The company chose Yoon to advertise to youthful online female shoppers because she seemed more approachable than traditional professional models.
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Yoon Seo-na, who shot to online fame with a sexy video clip, appears in clip promoting an on-line shopping mall.
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ˇ°These UCC stars get a better reaction from netizens than professional models because they seem friendlier. And we're looking for more SCC models -- we just made an internet advertisement to find them,ˇ± said the executive at Clubber who hired Yoon.
A website to host and sell SCCs and UCCs has been set up to distribute the clips to online consumers, for a fee. PixCow hosts instructional and helpful homemade video clips that are made available to the public on www.pixcow.com.
Browsers search for clips and pay a small fee to watch them. The topics of the clips vary, from cooking tips to instructions on using software, computers and tech gadgets. The revenue is divided between the producers of the videos and Pixcow. More than 10,000 new video clips were uploaded to Pixcow in one month, with some videomakers earning tens of thousand of won in a week.
Lee Dong-hoon, a researcher at Samsung Economic Research Institute, said that while homemade video has the potential to make an impact on the marketing industry, the medium is still young. ˇ°These SCC clips are a new territory and there are still a lot of people who don't know about them or how to find them. But new jobs and services, which were unimaginable in the past, will keep on evolving to fill the developing need.ˇ±
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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