What is the line between “Fan-Based Contest” and just get­ting your fans to do work for you?

I’m all for viral mar­ket­ing, let­ting fans have a piece of the “inven­tion” pie and so on. When I read the title of this arti­cle, I thought it was a cool idea and was inter­ested to see how it was done and how its pan­ning out. While pop­u­lar­ity for the con­test seems to be work­ing, the promo work done for the con­test by the fans is less than stel­lar to say the least.

Its seems Mountain Dew didn’t even allow the fans to help cre­ate the flavours. It started with 7 sam­ple flavours. Narrowed down to 3 from there. Fans were then divided into “Nations” that were given the task to do every­thing to pro­mote thse flavours includ­ing work­ing with Mountain Dew’s exist­ing agen­cies to cre­ate online pro­mos. They were also tasked to go on a cross-country road trip to pro­mote their given flavour. I won­der if these peo­ple were paid for their time and if, cre­atively, these are the ads that Mountain Dew would have wanted had this been done as an inter­nal cam­paign rather than a “contest”.

Bears the ugly head of Spec Work…

Check it out: Mountain Dew Releases 3 Fan-Created Flavors