Tired of fashion models and athletes taking up all the good billboard space? Well, you don’t have to be a model or athlete to appear on a billboard for beer brewer, James Ready.

The Ontario-based company is offering customers the chance to share its billboards. All a customer has to do is go to the company’s website and upload a personal photo and message. If chosen, the photo-message will be featured on a billboard, alongside a bottle of James Ready and a thank you to the uploader for “Keeping J.R. a Buck.”

This marketing campaign is smart. The implication is that even though billboards are expensive, James Ready still needs to advertise on them. Hiring an advertising agency to create billboard content would be an additional expense, an expense that might drive up the cost of the beer. So, in order to keep the price of James Ready at a buck a bottle, they have to turn to the people who love the beer the most.

This is customer participation at its finest, which is summed up by the Ready website  tagline: “Help us, help you, pay less.”

In addition to creating billboard content, James Ready asks customers to generate messages for its baseball caps and beer labels. These ideas are also submitted on the company’s website, which has an intentionally cheap, lo-fidelity look.

The site offers tips on how to make coasters, flying discs, and dartboards, by cutting them out of the beer’s cardboard carrying case. Simple do-it-yourself guides teach visitors how to create James Ready hats and t-shirts with labels peeled from the company’s bottles.

The humorous, homespun quality of the marketing campaign helps to promote James Ready’s focus on two main ideas: fun and value. In addition, interactivity creates a more personal link to the brand and its customers.