Would companies benefit from incorporating consumer generated ads in their marketing strategy?

Abstract: Technological developments constantly change companies' marketing strategies and theoverall communication between companies and their customers. This has led to new forms ofmarketing such as user generated content (UGC) marketing. UGC has been proposed to beperceived as more trustworthy and authentic than traditional firm created content. Companieshave therefore started to incorporate UGC in their advertising strategies. This type ofadvertising is referred to as consumer generated advertising (CGA). However, the research onCGA and its effect on customers was found limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study is tocompare the performance of consumer generated advertising (CGA) with firm generatedadvertising (FGA). The purpose led to the following research question “What are the effects ofCGA in comparison to FGA with respect to (1) consumer attitudes towards the advertisementand (2) consumer engagement?”. The study was conducted using a quantitative research designwhere 217 respondents were asked questions regarding their attitude towards the advertisementand their intention to engage with the advertisement. All the questions were based on Ducoffe(1995) and Brackett and Carr (2001) advertising model. However, after collecting andanalyzing the data from the questionnaires an alternative model was presented. The alternativemodel explained that attitude is more affected by enjoyment and emotions while engagementis more connected to valuable information. Moreover, the results from the questionnairesshowed that the respondents had a better attitude towards FGA than CGA but CGA had a higherengagement rate than FGA.