It could have been the same old Super Bowl story. A creative team toils for months, and a client spends millions, on 30-seconds of big-game glory. Then, faster than the MVP can say "Disneyland," the applause fades, the spot is relegated to routine rotation and, ultimately, assumes its final resting place on the agency reel.

But after spending about 14 months creating a story arc with Charles Barkley and Dwyane Wade -- the shooting guard wants into the legend's Fave Five -- T-Mobile didn't want its investment riding the bench. Instead, Seattle-based Publicis in the West repurposed outtakes from the Super Bowl spot for a user-generated ad contest. Consumers were invited to mash up the clips online and submit them for judging. The winning ad -- from an Orlando, Fla.-based insurance salesman -- bowed this month during the National Basketball Association finals, presented by official sponsor T-Mobile.

User-generated ad contests are not for the faint of heart. Advertisers including Doritos, Chevy and Heinz have all introduced them with varying degrees of success -- some went without a hitch, others were inundated with unusable fodder or outright lampooned. But the T-Mobile campaign introduced a new twist on the recent favorite. Controls, both within the source material and the technology, ensured there would be little fiddling with the formula. Although the tactic sidestepped any public relations blunders, it raises this question: In an era when consumers are used to unfettered expression, can a campaign set strict parameters and still engage customers?

Background

It was the second quarter of SuperBowl XLII, and Wade was about to score. No, the Miami Heat guard wasn't taking a Bo Jackson-like turn on the football field. He was about to score a place in Barkley's Fave Five, a courtship that played out over six T-Mobile spots beginning in November 2006. D-Wade had begged, pleaded and bribed -- "How about my championship ring. I'll let you wear it for a week, two weeks. Okay, a whole month." He shot, he missed, he nearly had it. "If you make this putt, I'll put you in my Five," Barkley promised, before ringing D-Wade's cell phone at the crucial moment.

The May-December bromance played to NBA audiences, part of T-Mobile's sponsorship deal struck in 2005. And as Wade's star rose on the court and in commercials -- he's starred in ads for Gatorade and Converse—interest in the campaign has also grown, says Dan Fietsam, evp, executive creative director at Publicis in the West.

"They're really fun together," says Jocelyn English, senior manager of sponsorships for T-Mobile. "The opportunity to have a Super Bowl spot came up and we had enough for a 60-second spot."

In the Super Bowl climax, Wade gets his man, and a dose of buyer's remorse as Barkley dogs him day and night, calling to say, "Your defense has really been shaky lately…Either play better or call in sick…Well, it's only 2 o'clock here… You like Popsicles?"

But with the loquacious Barkley as the celebrity mouthpiece, there were a few gems on the cutting-room floor. "We had an abundance of great stuff," Fietsam says. "You know Charles, he is not shy, and he generated quite a bit of improv stuff that was just fantastic."



So when senior marketing management asked for more from its Super Bowl investment, the agency's T-Mobile team had an answer ready. "We thought, 'This is a great opportunity for a user-generated campaign,'" Fietsam says.

Strategy

User-generated advertising is an aging ingenue. Since its debut a few years ago, a slew of advertisers, from MasterCard to Mountain Dew, have tried their hand. Those that aim for entirely original content sometimes contend with submissions that are distasteful, unsuitable or wholly inappropriate. (One submission to a Heinz contest last year showed a man brushing his teeth with the ketchup.)

Even providing some content has proven problematic, as Chevrolet famously discovered. Instead of inspiring a feel-good viral campaign for its Chevy Tahoe, a 2006 user-generated ad contest inadvertently set off an avalanche of lampoon ads that linked the SUV's fuel inefficiency to global warming. Most importantly to Fietsam, most UGC ad contests narrow the scope of contestants to those with the tech skills and the time. "It requires a lot of investment by the user to take part in a competition," Fietsam said.

Publicis in the West set out to create a mash-up contest that anyone could enter via www.t-mobilenba.com/duo. Commissioning original content from consumers seemed like too much of a time commitment for them, Fietsam explains. But inviting users to remix old footage and add music via a simple online interface seemed less like homework and more like entertainment, Fietsam says.

"We kind of felt like if we just put all these outtakes in an iMovie kind of interface, people could mash up their version of the spot. Wouldn't that be a fun thing to do?" he says.

The agency provided the video footage and music. Garrigan Lyman, a digital shop in Seattle, constructed the Remixer -- an interface that allows users to click, drag and arrange footage and music. "It's really easy," Feitsam says. "We put the sandbox out and we put all the tools and toys in it and people just go at it." Anyone with five free minutes could fiddle around and hit submit.

The contest was consistent with the campaign's playful vibe. "We could take all this great material and tap into consumers' fascination with the players, with their personalities," English says.

By keeping the contest simple, the team also hit on a formula that allowed consumers to participate while protecting the brand. "It was kind of foolproof," Fietsam admits. "We controlled what the content was. We controlled the music." Users could work only with what they were given -- no home video, no porn noises, no smarmy copy. "The idea wasn't to create a place where people couldn't be creative," English says. "It just didn't lend itself to abuse."



Creative

Advertising promoting the contest, which accepted submissions from Feb. 3-March 15, was tacked on to two spots in T-Mobile's ongoing NBA campaign. The ads, which appeared during regular-season games, explored Barkley and Wade's post-Super Bowl chemistry, with Barkley as the pursuer. In one spot, he calls Wade during a press conference to ask for "those cushy, cotton NBA logo socks… I need 'em for my footsies."

"We spent nothing incrementally to promote the contest," says English, who added that even the Remixer construction and Web site redesign were built into T-Mobile's sponsorship package as a site refresh. Online promotion was also included in T-Mobile's sponsorship, including a YouTube channel featuring the NBA duo's greatest hits.

"It was incredibly cost-effective," Fietsam says. "Those assets we generated with the film would normally never have seen the light of day. Anybody that shoots commercial film probably uses one-tenth of the film they shoot, and the rest ends up in a bin somewhere. That we were able to maximize our film investment that way is unprecedented."

Once users enter the site, they're offered a short tutorial on how to use the Remixer. Consumers can toy with 69 different 1- to 7-second clips, 56 sound effects and 11 music tracks to string together videos on themes such as Barkley's basketball advice, food or getting-to-know-you chitchat.

The winning spot, chosen by a committee that included the agency, client and Barkley himself, shows D-Wade answering the phone mid-shower, soaped up and with the water running. Sir Charles proceeds to quiz Wade on various types of cheese, "Do you know what Gouda cheese is?" When Wade protests, Barkley reminds him, "I put you in the Fave Five, I can take you out. You were No. 5 anyway." Wade stays on the line until Barkley decides to ditch the cheese and make himself a smoothie. The ad aired during the NBA finals earlier this month.

Results

Of about 1,200 entries received, nearly 900 were eligible for consideration under the contest rules, says English, adding they didn't receive any "abusive" entries.

The company's brand awareness and consideration among the NBA audience rose by 12 percent during the six-week contest, according to internal research by T-Mobile. The increase is considerable given that T-Mobile's other NBA sponsorship activities have increased brand awareness by 4 percent and consideration by 7 percent over general market audiences, English says.

And, of course, it didn't hurt that this year's bicoastal matchup between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers was one of the most watched in years. Game six of the finals, wherein the Celtics clinched their 17th championship after a 22-year hiatus, drew 16.8 million viewers. In fact, the finals drew its largest audience since 2001, with an overall 11.5 rating and attracted 43 percent more viewers than last year.



Did it work?

Measuring the contest's success depends on the yardstick. Going by submissions alone, 1,200 is a modest number, and a quarter of those were ineligible. In 2004, Converse attracted 1,500 submissions. Doritos got more than 1,000 for its six-week "Crash the Super Bowl" contest. And MasterCard earned more than 100,000 entries in about three months.

But the numbers are not the whole story. Not only did Publicis in the West breathe six extra months into its Super Bowl spot, the shop introduced a new method of controlling user-generated submissions. Consumers may not have had the chance to use their own video or copy, but the supplied pieces offered more than 1 billion possible combinations. And possibly because the time investment was minimal, the contest presented itself less as a forum for self-expression and more as a diversion, perhaps one of greater interest to tech-savvy NBA and T-Mobile fans.

All told, the client was happy with the campaign -- a cost-effective, innovative twist on a well-explored formula. Submissions were tendered, awareness was boosted and the videos continue to register views on the T-Mobile site, where visitors continue to play with the Remixer and submit videos. They may also post them to Facebook and other social networking platforms.

As for Sir Charles and D-Wade, their show will go on. Though he is unsure of how the story will develop, Fietsam says the b-ballers will hit the (story)boards next season.