Music + Uni Students + Mobile Phones = a perfect competition that connects with the desired audience using their favorite way to communicate and in the process reminding people that your phone can do more than just make calls.

Launching “The World’s Largest Pep Rally” competition this week, wireless carrier AT&T in the States is inviting uni students across the nation to vote for their school to win a concert with the Dave Matthews Band. Students with AT&T service vote by sending messages from their mobile phones in the form of text, photo, video or audio inviting Dave to their campus – those without AT&T can go to the campaign website to send a note to Dave. In choosing the winner, AT&T will consider the school with the most votes and the most creative invitations.

AT&T made a very smart move in making all of the voting free – so no extra network charges for participating, a smart move to get people to use their phone more down the road. People can vote up to 50 times each day. Dave Matthews Band will post a sampling of invitations on its MySpace page and the official band website.  

The campaign site shows which campuses are in the lead – as of press time Baylor University in Dallas is just in front of the nation’s armed services universities (U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Air Force Academy) who are #2, #3 and #4 respectively.  More than 100 schools are competing and AT&T has already seen 1,000,000 invitations coming in from participating students.

Some people have of course tried to rally their fellow students with MySpace and Facebook pages. Washington State University developed a website that attempts to rally students, alumni and fans to send invitations to the band.  This kind of added consumer engagement definitely means AT&T has hit a home run with this competition.