Careerbuilder lights a fire under consumer generated content

The Super Bowl is only a few weeks away, and that event has always been about one thing to us in the ad industry: the big-budget, high exposure TV spots. In recent years it’s also been about something that causes some creatives to groan: consumer generated content. Yes, a number of the big brands have given their ad agencies the night off in favor of running contests where the unwashed masses, the hoi polloi, John Q. Public competes to create the best ad on their own.

After working with agencies like Cramer-Krasselt and Wieden + Kennedy over the years, Super Bowl darling Careerbuilder.com has given up on the ad agency route, choosing instead to run a competition for the general public to come up with their 2010 Super Bowl ad. Originally set to have only one winner with a cool $100,000 prize, the in-house team opted to award three winning ideas the grand prize. Each winning entry was professionally recreated with the participation of the creator, and all three ads were placed on the Careerbuilder site for the public to vote on the best of the three ads.

Now two of the three ads came from ideas made by people who likely aren’t strangers to the ad biz (one came from a video producer, another from a video editor), but one of the winners came from somebody with no direct Madison Avenue ties. Can you guess which spot came from that person?

After you guess, you can check the stories of the people behind the spots here, here and here. You can also see their original submissions, before Careerbuilder.com reshot them. Trust me, it will be much, much easier for you to pick the non-ad person if you saw those submissions first.