It's been about a week since Mitt Romney's campaign launched the most interactive experiment of any we've seen come from the Republican side of the presidential field, calling on their supporters to submit 30- or 60-second TV ads, mashing up a rich array of clips, audio and photos provided by the campaign.

It's a smart way for the campaign to engage grass-roots supporters, and to also erase any memories people may have of Romney's reluctance to participate in the Republican YouTube debate. And, as a number of observers predicted, it's also a bit of a double-edged sword.

So far, nearly 600 people have jumped in, using Yahoo's Jumpcut video editing platform to create and/or comment on some 76 submissions. The experiment also earned the Romney campaign a lot of positive press during a slow news week, and it looks like traffic to the Romney website bumped up to from 16% to 17% of all visits to Republican presidential campaign sites (according to Hitwise) and blog mentions of Romney's name also spiked to nearly 1,000 on the day of the Jumpcut announcement.

At the same time, check out how one user named "galaxy pie" remixed Romney's official campaign ad "Tested, Proven" into "Mitt is a Creep." He or she didn't change any of the images, but simply by adding new captions and some creepy music, the Romney ad has been turned into its opposite.

I asked Romney internet director Mindy Finn (who's on "leave" from her techPresident blogging while working on the campaign) about the pluses and minuses of the "Team Mitt: Create Your Own Ad" contest and she said, "We're pleased with the response. It's fun to see folks' creativity and how the community is joining together to provide feedback and tips to improve each other's work. The good news is that the contest entries have virtually all been positive, so it hasn't been an issue. It's comforting to see an effort that puts confidence and trust in the public, and to see people live up to it." As for the "Mitt is a Creep" ad, she noted, "It's the nature of the 'net that some will try to manipulate the process, but we're not going to let that dissuade us from directly and interactively engaging members of Team Mitt."

While I think Mindy has a great and open perspective about all this, it's interesting to me that the Romney campaign hasn't taken down the "Mitt is a Creep" ad, even though it clearly violates the campaign's stated rules that ads made on the site be supportive of the campaign. We know from other soundings that the campaign is removing ads it finds offensive, which is its right. Perhaps they decided that while total message control might be nice (or it might earn them a black eye online) it couldn't hurt to let a few attack ads lurk around the edges, to get their supporters fired up?