Besides the obvious photogenic feat of John Stamos [I had to work in a throwback to Jesse Katsopolis in the Full House days] yogurt giant The Dannon Co. has partaken in a pretty cool creative process to prepare their Dannon Oikos ad installment for third-quarter Super Bowl XLVI.

The company and its ad agency, Young & Rubicam, sought the expertise of Poptent, a crowdsourced video production company, in selecting the talent that would take actor-musician-performer Stamos into the living rooms of all Americans – and continue his influence via Dannon YouTube and Facebook channels and even in-store.

“It’s a very branded spot and the takeaway is, ‘How far would you go for Dannon Oikos?’” says Michael Neuwirth, senior director of public relations for Dannon. “The idea is, ‘Sharing something that’s this good can be that hard.’ There is a lot of element of surprise… great Super Bowl advertising is entertaining and has that element of surprise.”

John Stamos to star in Dannon Oikos Super Bowl commercial

Poptent president Neil Perry says that the video production platform currently has 42,000 video creators in-system, a number that was a much lower 350 when the service was first launched in 2007. “We delivered 34 finished commercials [to Dannon] using a stand-in for John Stamos,” Perry says. “It’s a luxury for a marketing company to be able to look at 34 video executions from highly talented videographers, so it’s a great process from that standpoint.”

Dannon worked directly with Poptent to hand-pick candidates from a short-list of Poptent.net videographers because of the proprietary nature of the project. Young videographer Remy Neymarc and his brother, Andrew, were the lucky directors retained for the prime-time project.

According to Neuwirth, “we sought to expand the field of creative concepts we were looking for, and the member-only crowdsource that Poptent delivers was extremely effective for us to generate a multitude of concepts in a short period of time.” The creative process did not utilize what Perry calls “antiquated storyboards,” but placed more emphasis on focus groups and quantitative study.

Each year, the build-up to Super Bowl “is filled with more and more anticipation,” Neuwirth notes. “From a customer perspective, we look at this as a marathon and not a sprint. That reflects our approach to growing the yogurt category [and building on their share of Greek with names like Chobani out there.] It’s a campaign, not just an ad.”

This year’s Super Bowl commercial is not a debut for Stamos, who was featured in an Oikos ad last summer [Reference: above video.] The Greek category “continues to grow like wildfire” for the White Plains, N.Y.-based yogurt company; other hot sellers include its Activia and Danimals product lines. Dannon has another newbie, Dannon Pure, an “all family offering” at an “everyday price,” or 35 cents a cup within a six-pack, according to Neuwirth.