• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 19, 2013

General Motors and the Oscars telecast are back in business.

The Detroit carmaker said Wednesday that it was returning to the Oscars after negotiating a new five-year deal to advertise in the program that starts with the March 2, 2014 show on ABC.

The company dropped out of the program in 2009 during the depths of the recession as an austerity measure. It also bailed from other big events, including the Super Bowl, but subsequently returned.

As part of its return to the Oscars, GM announced an alliance with crowd-sourcing creative community Mofilm to create ideas for ads, one of which could end up in the 2014 Oscars telecast.

Scripts generated from Mofilm will be evaluated by a panel of pros, including Linus Karlsson, chairman of GM ad agency Commonwealth, a unit of Interpublic Group; film directors Spike Lee and Jon Landau and Tim Mahoney, Chevrolet’s global CMO.

Mahoney said the company is looking for stories that celebrate simple but significant moments in life. “We hope the ingenuity of this program will allow filmmakers to capture the essence of what owning a Chevrolet means to people around the world,” stated Mahoney.

Scripts for the Oscars crowdsourcing project are due Aug. 16, 2013.

Chevy used crowdsourcing to create a TV spot called “Happy Grad” in 2012.

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