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Consumers Get a Chance to Go Commercial
June 01, 2010

Madison Avenue agency executives are always joining panels to judge the merits of each other’s work. Now a panel is being, well, empaneled, to judge how well consumers do when they try to create commercials.

CheapTickets, part of Orbitz Worldwide, is announcing on Tuesday morning a user-generated content contest, asking consumers to create a 30-second commercial that shows “just how good it feels to save” by using cheaptickets.com.

The judges on the panel will include the executives at CheapTickets who oversee advertising and Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

And so as not to hurt the feelings of the CheapTickets ad agency, David Lubars, chief creative officer for North America at BBDO Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, will be on the panel, too.

The grand prize in the contest is $50,000 worth of flight credits through CheapTickets and an opportunity to see the commercial run during the month of August on the Travel Channel cable network.

Deborah Italiano, vice president for brand marketing at Orbitz Worldwide in Chicago, estimated that the spot that wins the grand prize will appear five or so times that month on Travel Channel. Such a contest is a good way to market CheapTickets, Ms. Italiano said, because it is a brand “that needs to be marketed both online and by its customers.”

The customers who frequent cheaptickets.com “want to tell people” when “they find deals,” she added, calling it “a celebration of getting a good deal.”

There are two other top prizes in the contest, a first prize of $5,000 in flight vouchers and a second prize of $2,500 in free airfare.

Information about the contest will be on a section of the CheapTickets Web site. Video clips can be uploaded there from Tuesday through July 13. The judges will narrow the field to six finalists, based on criteria like creativity and the potential to go “viral.”

The six finalists will be online, where consumers can vote for their favorite from July 20 to 27. The three winners will be announced around July 27.

Source :- http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com