By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

JOEL MOSS LEVINSON

“It’s so great to have license to be an idiot.’’

Joel Moss Levinson always knew he had a calling in life.
But it took cheap video cameras, YouTube and some desperate corporations to show him what it was. Mr. Levinson’s skill is turning out homemade corporate commercials - what advertisers call a form of “usergenerated content.”Companies, frantic to connect with younger consumers, sponsor contests seeking these commercials to find new ways to advertise their products, often attracting hundreds of entries.

So far, Mr. Levinson, a college dropout with dozens of failed jobs on his resume, has won 11 contests - earning more than $200,000 in money and prizes. Mr. Levinson won $100,000 from Klondike after filming himself in the Arctic singing about Klondike ice cream bars. He won four months worth of hotel stays from Best Western for a song he performed about his water cooler.

He has won trips to Budapest, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen from Delta Air Lines; an iPod from the American National Cattle- Women; and $6,000 from the Israel Project, an advocacy group, after honors in three separate categories - English, German and Russian - and he barely speaks German or Russian.

“It’s so great to have license to be an idiot,” he said.

It is especially great when idiocy is sponsored by corporations. Companies began soliciting these commercials a few years ago after noticing YouTube’s popularity . The commercials now run on television. Prizes have grown, too: this year, Doritos intends to run a usergenerated commercial during the next Super Bowl, and offering $1 million to the winner.

Mr. Levinson, 28, grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where his father was a prosecutor and his mother was a writer.“He’s always willing to be outrageous,” said his father, Jim Levinson.“Joel gets determined to pursue something, and he will devise some way to get there.”

Mr. Levinson was working as a comedy- club usher in Indianapolis in spring 2007 when he read that Planet Smoothie, a franchise based in Atlanta, Georgia, was looking for someone to be its Cupman mascot.“ ‘Would you be interested in traveling the country- Would you be interested in dressing like a giant smoothie-’ Well, on all of those fronts, kind of, yes,” he said.

For his entry, he sang lyrics like, “I wanna found a new country in Asia and call it Cupistan.”There were 95 entries, but his won easily.

It took some time before he could support himself on his victories.
He began to bring his video camera on trips that he had won, exploiting the tours for the scenery. When he was sent to Australia for a wine contest, he filmed segments for Oreo and Nesquik contests.
When he won a Nature Valley granola bar contest and his prize was a trip to the Arctic, he filmed the spots for Klondike and for the Israel Project, for which he dressed in a penguin suit.

“When you think of Israel as a great democracy, you don’t think of a guy in a penguin costume running around,” said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the founder of the Israel Project.“That’s the point of the Web. You want something viral that will be catchy, that people will say, that’s different.”

Mr. Levinson’s gregariousness is an asset in the user-generated content world, as many of these contests are determined by voting.
He has a Facebook group titled “Yes, Joel, I’ll vote for your newest stupid contest” and he uses Twitter, blogs, e-mail and text messages, asking acquaintances to vote.

Mr. Levinson says he will enter any user-generated contest, no matter how small. But he refuses to enter sweepstakes or any other game that depends on luck.

“A sweepstakes is like a lottery, right- Everyone’s equal,” he said.“With contests, I feel like I’m able to bring whatever skills I have to the table.”