Journal of Advertising, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 87–102. © 2011 American Academy of Advertising. All rights reserved. ISSN 0091-3367 / 2011 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/JOA0091-3367400106 Rust and Oliver (1994) demonstrated astonishing prescience around 15 years ago when they stated, “Advertising is on its deathbed and it will not survive long, having contracted a fatal case of new technology.” At that time, the Internet was nascent, sophisticated search engines had not yet been in- vented, and click-throughs (CT), click-through rates (CTR), price-per-click (PPC), and conversion rate (CR) metrics were still a long way off. Advertising didn’t die though; it just got better and adapted to new media. Research into advertising’s impact failed to evolve at the same rate, however, or to keep pace with technological innovation. Traditionally, advertising has been defined as communica- tion and information flows originating within firms or their designated ad agencies, which create ads and pay to transmit them in broadcast or print media with reasonably clear inten- tions: to inform, persuade, or remind present and potential customers of their offerings or of the organization itself (Barton 1950, p. 928). Consumers were the passive recipients of these messages, reacting to them either by becoming attentive, by being converted, or by being able to recall them. More often than not, consumers simply ignored them, but determined advertisers didn’t leave it at that and instead researched the effects and impacts of the ads, mostly through surveys (see, e.g., Leavitt 1970; Schlinger 1979; Shimp 1981) to which consumers respond. The data thus gathered was reasonably easy to interpret—advertisers featured more of ads that were working, and less of those that were not. The Internet has evolved from simple information retrieval to interactivity, interoperability, and collaboration. This progression has been so pronounced that many observers have termed the Internet as we know it today as “Web 2.0.” It is much more to do with what people are doing with the technology than the technology itself, for rather than merely retrieving information, users are now creating and consum- ing it, and hence adding value to the Web sites that permit them to do so. As a result, a lot of advertising communica- tion today is different than in the past. Unlike in the past, ads are not unidirectional (from advertiser to audience) and responded to passively. Customers are now making their own ads, and propagating them on free Web 2.0 conduits such as YouTube. The creation of advertisements and brand-focused videos is no longer the prerogative of the organization or its designated ad agency. We term this phenomenon consumer- generated (CG) advertising, and it represents a subset of the more general swell in user-generated content. User-generated content refers to situations whereby consumers freely choose to create and share information of value (Stoeckl, Rohrmeier, and Hess 2007). CG advertising, which can be seen as a form of user-generated content, refers to specific instances where consumers create brand-focused messages with the intention of informing, persuading, or reminding others (Berthon, Pitt, Colin Campbell (Ph.D., Simon Fraser University) is a lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Leyland F. Pitt (Ph.D., University of Pretoria; Ph.D., Lulea Univer- sity of Technology, Sweden) is a professor of marketing and senior research fellow, Leeds University Business School, Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia. Michael Parent (Ph.D., Queen’s University, Canada) is an associate professor, Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser Univer- sity, Vancouver, British Columbia. Pierre R. Berthon (Ph.D., Henley Management College, Brunel University) is Clifford F. Youse Chair and professor of marketing, McCallum School of Business, Bentley College, Waltham, MA. The authors acknowledge helpful comments and advice from the anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor. UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER CONVERSATIONS AROUND ADS IN A WEB 2.0 WORLD Colin Campbell, Leyland F. Pitt, Michael Parent, and Pierre R. Berthon ABSTRACT: User-generated online content poses a problem when it takes the form of advertising. Consumer-generated advertising challenges researchers and practitioners to understand consumers’ articulated responses to ads and to the re- sponses of other consumers, as well as the implications these may have for the brand. Traditional research methods such as viewer-response testing may be limited when the viewer becomes part of the conversation. This exploratory study attempts to interpret the conversations consumers have around consumer-generated ads using the comments they have posted to each ad’s Web page. We show how conversations around ads can be mapped and interpreted, and then develop a typology of consumer-generated ad conversations. We discuss managerial implications of our findings, outline the limitations of the technique used, and trace avenues to extend the research.