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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.
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Mr. Levinson’s skill is turning out homemade corporate commercials — what advertisers call a form of “user-generated 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 and lots of attention.
So far, Mr. Levinson, a college dropout with dozens of failed jobs on his résumé, has won 11 contests — earning more than $200,000 in money and prizes. His success has made him into the digital age version of Evelyn Ryan, the woman from Defiance, Ohio, who supported her family by winning commercial jingle contests in the 1950s and ’60s.
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While Mrs. Ryan’s talent was in writing, Mr. Levinson’s is in performing. He won $100,000 from Klondike after filming himself in the Arctic singing about Klondike bars. He won four months worth of free hotel stays from Best Western for a song he performed about his water cooler. When Little Penguin wine asked customers to film their best pickup line, Mr. Levinson submitted a video of his efforts to pick up a toy penguin, and won a trip to Australia.
He has won trips to Budapest, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen from Delta Air Lines; an iPod from the American National CattleWomen; 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, and wagered that campaigns created by customers might resonate with customers and turn into viral hits.
The initial commercials ran online only, but the fad has grown, and they now regularly run on television. Prizes have grown, too: this year, Doritos intends to run a user-generated commercial during the next Super Bowl, and offering $1 million to the winner.
Mr. Levinson, 28, has a hummingbird-like metabolism and attention span that seem made for the YouTube era. He 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.”
After a few semesters at George Washington University, where he declared that his major was medieval weaponry, he dropped out. Soon, he was living out of his car — happily, he says.
He settled briefly in Los Angeles, then New York, and made money from odd jobs: night clerk at a 24 Hour Fitness, going door to door promoting tree conservation, leading children’s songs at Jewish summer camps. “I think my résumé is up to, like, 40 jobs, and they’re all terrible,” he said.
He was working as a comedy-club usher in Indianapolis in spring 2007 when he read that Planet Smoothie, a franchise based in Atlanta, was looking for someone to be its Cupman mascot.
“When I read the description, it was like, ‘Actors, comics, musicians,’ — whatever,” Mr. Levinson said, “‘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.”
For his entry, he stared into the camera, writhing and singing lyrics like, “I wanna found a new country in Asia and call it Cupistan.” There were 95 entries, but his won easily.
“Everyone just kind of fell in love with Joel,” said Chris Morocco, a Planet Smoothie executive. “We had people coming in singing the jingle.”
He followed that with several small contest victories, but it took some time before he could support himself on them. He was so poor that when he filmed a video for the National Beef Ambassador program sponsored by the CattleWomen, “I couldn’t even buy steak for the video so I had to use chili,” he said. “It’s a song called ‘More Beef in More Places,’ and the only place I could afford to eat it was my apartment.”
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