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."