Sprint is promoting its iPhone killer Instinct by offering to pay YouTube users to upload videos which include images of Instinct.

A site dedicated to this offer announces:

Shamelessly plug the Samsung Instinct into your home movie this summer, turn your loved ones into cash with blatant product placement. It’s the greatest product placement home movie of all time.

And no, you don’t have to actually own the phone. In fact, it’s perfectly OK if you’ve never seen it. They’ve made it easy by providing the images and the movie upload options right there on the website:

I don’t doubt that we’ll soon be seeing a number of  movies with the shameless  Instinct plug on youtube. With the kind of money sprint is spending there’ll be plenty of teens who’ll take up the offer.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for these videos  myself. (I only have to tap the YouTube icon on my iPhone for that) I’m interested in this not because of Instinct, but because it will be interesting to see how creative people get when putting in these Instinct images in their videos.

But that aside, does this seem a bit desperate? Maybe, to be honest I’m impressed with this one. Their previous attempt at taking on the iPhone was a pathetic, counter-productive head-to-head comparison that simply begged the question: “where’s the catch, buddy?”

This one at least shows that Sprint is learning from its mistakes. But that may not be enough to take on Apple, which isn’t making very many of them in the first place.