In its short but much-vaunted history, user-generated content (UGC) has largely meant consumers creating films, ads or other media on behalf of a client. It's allowed the public to share an admiration for a brand or lend its opinions on a brand's values. Until now.

With its Let Them Post campaign, eBay is taking the notion of UGC to a new and logical level - encouraging eBay sellers to create commercials for the items they intend to sell.

Conceived by Creative Artists Agency, the idea for Let Them Post came from a simple brief from eBay, that bills itself as a community of communities: "eBay is a part of pop culture and we want to keep the spirit of that alive."

"eBay has always been a people-powered marketplace and sellers have always reflected their personality in the smallest of things, like their usernames, to the largest of things, like the way they write a description or the pictures they take," says eBay director of marketing Kevin McSpadden. "We wanted to continue innovating and sparking the community's imagination on how to tell its unique stories."

Those stories can take myriad forms. In one film for vintage Lego men, the seller crafts a balletic procession of dancing men that culminates in a breakdancing showdown. In another, a seller sings about his "most awesome guitar" and in another, a boyfriend attempts to create his very own sex tape with the camcorder he intends to sell before his girlfriend kiboshes the attempt.

The interesting thing about eBay's initiative is that it bridges commerce and creativity. If you do a search for Lego on YouTube you'll find roughly 28,000 hits, which means Lego enthusiasts already use filmmaking as a form of expression. But add the commerce layer and you've got an avenue for individuals to financially benefit from their creative endeavors.

The result is a win-win-win situation for sellers, buyers and eBay itself. Sellers are encouraged to more actively market their wares, buyers get entertained while shopping and eBay ups its cultural ante. McSpadden calls it a "serendipitous route to success".

Jae Goodman, creative director at CAA, says that when they first started working with eBay in October, the goal was to "make the eBay experience more fun, exciting and engaging." He says the first idea was to create a TV show, but with the realization that eBay boasts hundreds of millions of users, the focus shifted to programming eBay as a network.

"We started to pick the word 'network' apart a bit. It would be very 'un-eBay' to broadcast one big message out to all their users," Goodman says. "People go with something specific in mind so we wanted to create communication that would be person-to-person, community-to-community."

CAA enlisted the help of production company Smuggler to create upwards of 120 films to launch the project. Smuggler, in turn, reached out to the creative community to find filmmakers - some professional, some not - who were also eBay sellers.

"We needed someone who was not only going to reach out to the professional community, but someone who was a member in this broader creative community," says Goodman. "[Smuggler] reached out to non-professionals who would be interested and would do something interesting. They did a remarkable job of going after non-pros. In many cases it was someone's assistant, or someone knew someone just coming out of film school. A lot of the people were great creatives, not just people making a living as directors." With numerous films already out there, eBay users are encouraged to add video to their auctions.

So far, promotion of the initiative has been homespun. The initial set of films were included on eBay sellers' pages, linked out to social media and video-hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpace, AOL and more. It was also seeded by Seize the Media on special interest sites pertinent to items for sale. McSpadden says there is no ancillary marketing push, but die-hard users will find out more at eBay Live, the auctioneer's annual consumer conference in June. He also hints that Let Them Post is only the beginning of a much larger plan, and more entertainment-based content, such as short films, is on the way. "We're still experimenting. Suffice to say, whatever we do, we know it will be entertaining."

Despite the potential, McSpadden says eBay is not looking to become the next YouTube or a destination for aggregated content. Instead, he says, it's using a popular form of expression to further its goal of "facilitating and sparking new innovations so the buying and selling experience is more fun and beneficial to everybody".

"It wasn't about having to catch up," he says. "There is just something happening out there where a lot of moths are being attracted to this particular flame. People are putting things out there and having a point of view. We just saw that as a great testimony to the power of video and the natural evolution from photography."

As for that vintage Lego men film making the rounds online, that's just a happy accident. "Viral video wasn't the goal," says Goodman. "That's just a nice side effect."

eBay http://www.ebay.comM
Creative Artists Agency http://www.caa.com
Smuggler http://www.smugglersite.com