The haters showed up in droves when Chevrolet allowed users to create ads for its Chevrolet Tahoe sport utility vehicle. But Chevy may have gotten the last laugh.

Last spring, viewers of NBC's Donald Trumpathon, The Apprentice, were invited to visit a Chevrolet Web site where they could assemble video clips, music and written supertitles into commercials for the enormous conveyance. Not surprisingly, given the political incorrectness of SUVs, some of the ads were less than respectful. There were versions that showed the Tahoe tearing across a desert while the onscreen text proclaimed it had been a rainforest before global warming. And plenty of contributions included references to the vehicle's lousy gas mileage.

Yet Chevy and its ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, left the negative spots online, and claim to be delighted with the campaign. "Tree-huggers don't really like full-size SUVs anyway," says Brian McCallum, a senior vice president at Campbell-Ewald. "The only filters we kept on were for things like profanity and racial slurs. The other stuff stayed." Why keep the negative ads up at the site? For one thing, says McCallum, it helps spark interest in the project.

And Campbell-Ewald's Dilworth says there are deeper reasons as well. "I think leaving them up is pretty important," he says. "If you are going to play in this dialogue-driven world, you have to accept that it's not for the faint of heart. The alternative is to remain closed, the way companies have been historically, and this is about marketing the companies, not just products. If you open the companies up, they gain credibility," says Dilworth.

They also gain traffic. "It is a very cool way to create buzz in the marketplace, and to do it more cheaply and efficiently than doing it all yourself," says McCallum. "Having John Smith from Paducah say, 'this is great' can go further than having manufacturers yell and scream 'we're the best!' " More than 600,000 unique visitors showed up at the Tahoe site, logging almost 6 million page views in four weeks. That's well above the traffic volume for other Chevy online programs. A promotion for the Impala, for example, was tied in with national television ads for two weeks and drew less than one-third the number of visitors as the Tahoe campaign. The Tahoe ads also showed up on YouTube and other video sites. "They were everywhere. It was kind of insane," says McCallum.

People didn't just come to the site, they stayed; visitors spent an average of 9.45 minutes on the site, he says, far longer than a typical visit to Chevy's sites. Meanwhile, companies can spend hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars on 30-second TV ads. "People treated the images as if they were a puzzle, and put them together as they wanted," McCallum says. "To do that, they had to interact with the product, dig to find out fuel economy and price, learn about the active fuel management that operates on 8 or 4 cylinders," and more, he adds.

That kind of performance on the Web takes some planning, says Dilworth. "Doing this requires an investment, and you have to prepare for it," he explains. "You have to know the volume of traffic you expect, and prep the IT group ahead of time. They can elect not to host it, to use a third party, if they don't think they can bear the traffic burden. It makes sense to run scenarios, including extreme possibilities, to decide how you want to play things like hosting."

Letting the customers involve themselves in the marketing process seems to be one way of grabbing and holding their attention in a media-saturated world. "We're finding that people are more receptive if they participate," says McCallum. "The goal is to get them to accept our marketing message in a nontraditional format, and to get outside those formats better than Ford or Toyota does," he says.

A critical point: Chevy is not looking to replace traditional TV and radio and print, but to integrate the Web, and its user-driven components, into a comprehensive strategy. That includes new avenues, such as advertising and participating at community sites like MySpace. "We're growing as the technology grows, and our strategies become more complex because people are harder to reach," says McCallum. "Our challenge is to find new, different and effective ways to get messages to the masses, or to a specific demographic," he says.

Campbell-Ewald and Chevy followed the Tahoe campaign with another user-driven effort, this one centered on the MTV Video Music Awards. Viewers were referred to a Web site, where they were told that Chevrolet's fuel-efficient cars require owners to spend less time at the gas pump, and asked what they would do with the extra time. They responded with silly video clips of their new leisure activities, which were uploaded to the site, and sent to places like YouTube and MySpace—complete with Chevy's tagline and familiar bow tie logo.

Elsewhere, the trend is picking up speed. Frito-Lay Inc. is partnering with Yahoo! Inc. in an ad contest that will culminate with a user-created Doritos commercial—made with online tools provided by Yahoo!—to be shown during the 2007 Super Bowl. And Current.TV, the site created by Al Gore, is running ad-making contests for several major brands including Toyota, T-Mobile and Sony, among others.

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