ViTrue, Inc., pioneer of the world’s first user-created advertising platform, today announced that it has appointed one of the foremost authorities on global marketing and branding, John A. Quelch, to the company’s board of directors.  Quelch is currently a Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, positions he has held since 2001. Prior to that he served as Dean of London Business School.

“Research is proving that advertisements created by consumers have a much stronger impact on other consumers compared to professionally created advertisements and marketing messages,” stated Professor Quelch.  “I believe that in the future professionally created advertisements will simply exist to fill the small void that consumer created content has yet to fill.  ViTrue is at the forefront of this major industry change and it’s exciting to work with the company that is making it easy for savvy brands to work directly with their customers to harness this power and gain an early competitive advantage.”

A recent American Marketing Association survey further supports Professor Quelch’s views, finding that consumers prefer companies that let them create ads.  The research found that most adults feel that a company using customer-created advertising is “more customer-friendly”, “more creative”, and “more innovative” than companies using only professional advertising.  

“Professor Quelch’s decision to join our board of directors demonstrates the growing importance that marketers and global brands are placing on the one-to-one interactions they have with their most loyal customers,” said Reggie Bradford, founder and CEO of ViTrue.  “By empowering consumers with the tools required to actively and vocally express their passion for the products and services that impact their daily lives, brands are strategically partnering with their customers to create more compelling and powerful marketing messages than can be found coming from Madison Avenue today – and at a fraction of the cost.  Professor Quelch’s experiences, insight and broad professional network will help to further establish ViTrue as the industry standard for brands and agencies looking to harness the power of user-created advertising as part of the overall marketing mix.”

Professor Quelch is the author, co-author or editor of twenty books, including The New Global Brands (2006), Global Marketing Management (5th edition, 2006), The Global Market (2005), Cases in Advertising and Promotion Management (4th Edition, 1996) and The Marketing Challenge of Europe 1992 (2nd edition, 1991). He has published articles on marketing issues in leading management journals such as Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly and Sloan Management Review. Professor Quelch is a non-executive director of WPP Group plc, Pepsi Bottling Group, Gentiva Health Services and Inverness Medical Innovations Inc. He also serves pro bono as Chairman of the Port Authority of Massachusetts. 

About ViTrue, Inc.
Headquartered in Atlanta, with offices in New York and San Francisco, ViTrue is reinventing the way brand marketing is created, priced and distributed via an online video platform that combines user services, user tools and brand partnerships.  ViTrue’s platform is a user-created advertising product that enables brands to leverage consumer creativity to produce more relevant and engaging advertisements at a lower cost of production. The Company’s premier online video sharing community www.sharkle.com, recently awarded “Best of the Web” Video Sharing site by BusinessWeek along with Youtube and Google, is the destination for more than 100,000 registered members who are producing and sharing videos. For additional information, please visit www.vitrue.com.