Disney Turns to Guests to Promote Theme Parks

In one video, a little boy dances during a parade at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. In another, a young girl dressed as a princess embraces her father. And in a third, two women explore Cinderella Castle.
All are part of Disney’s new campaign called  “ Let the Memories Begin — a promotion that relies on what the company refers to as guest-generated content.

Let the Memories Begin is about real guests making real memories in our parks,” said Leslie Ferraro, executive vice president of global marketing for Disney Destinations. “Disney guests have always loved sharing their vacation memories with us and each other.

New technologies like YouTube and Facebook have made it easier and faster for our guests to share their memories, for Disney Parks to spotlight those memories on a larger scale, and for us to reinforce to our guests how important we think their memories are.”

Disney isn’t alone. The travel industry — which for years considered videos as byproducts of a happy vacation, if not liabilities that occasionally found their way on to the Internet — has also had a change of heart.

User-generated videos aren’t exactly new. They’ve been popular for years and have big audience online. According to ComScore, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August, the latest month available. That’s an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. Many of the clips online are produced on the cheap, using a cell phone and rudimentary editing software on a PC.

But Disney’s campaign marks a turning point. The grainy videos with the tinny sound that occasionally went viral are now being accepted and even celebrated as authentic representations of a vacation experience.

They’re real,”said Jason Stein,a writer, producer and director for Laundry Service Media. “No script, no actors. I understand why the travel industry wants to employ more user-generated videos: It’s a real person documenting a real experience.”

It's about more than lowering production standards and handing over some of the creative control to a customer, said Wojciech Lorenc, an assistant professor at Columbia College's television department. “It's more like a convergence,” he said. “Consumers and smart brands like Disney interact with each other and share similar aesthetic values because digital media has leveled the playing field.