When developing campaigns that solicit user generated content it’s always difficult to determine a measure of success.  How many submitted videos and video views make a campaign successful?  When answering this questions I take two approaches:

1)  Cost of impression.  A successful campaign will meet a Cost of Impression measure.  For instance, if the campaign costs $1MM and generates 10MM impressions the cost per impression is ($1MM / 10MM) = $0.10 per impression.  You can then benchmark that against other media options to determine a successful campaign.

2) Benchmark against historics.  One reason I keep this blog is so that I can record data points for campaigns.  This article from ClickZ has some great data points on a viral Pepsi campaign (article here).  The main take away is:

• “There were 400 video submissions posted on YouTube, surpassing YouTube’s benchmark of 200 videos.”

• “The videos received over four million page views.”

• “Over 700 blog postings mentioned the ad campaign.”

We don’t know how much Pepsi paid to promote this campaign — probably a lot.