A European political movement is asking its supporters to support its efforts by designing advertisements for the campaign. The Libertas party is hoping to be the first pan-European party to run candidates in all member states of the European Union. It wants to change the European Union (EU) fundamentally to give more power back to the participating countries. The website that is allowing users to create their own ads is UK built micro-site called ThisAd.

Whether or not you agree with the Libertas political agenda you have to give them credit for being creative and designing a campaign that will likely gain a fair bit of attention. The design an ad component is very simple to use and requires almost no computer skills much past being able to upload a picture. Libertas has already bought the ad space around the Internet and will be placing the user-generated ads on a number of high traffic websites and social networks such as MySpace.

User-generated content (UGC) may prove to be a very valuable tool for the Libertas. It is a great way to put faces to the names of supporters and give them a voice. Few things generate as much passion as politics, so the campaign has great potential.

This isn’t the first time that UGC has been used in politics and it likely won’t be the last. Barack Obama
kicked open that door with his use of social media to help spread his massage of hope. It is pretty safe to say that many political campaigns in the future will build off the success of these pioneers.