Our colleague Jennifer Mann has an interesting piece this week about some of the innovative approaches Sprint is using to spread the word about the Samsung Instinct.

With a marketing and launch budget for the Instinct that a Sprint executive previously told us was $100 million, the company has crafted movie trailers, produced strong TV spots and is running a film-your-own-Instinct contest.

This last approach in particular is drawing notice.

“Sprint Nextel Corp is asking young filmmakers – a.k.a. YouTube superstars – to “sell out” by dropping an image of the Samsung Instinct into their short video for $20 to the first 1,000 lucky chosen ones and $10,000 for a grand prize,” Moconews wrote.

Anyone wanting to submit a video could find more information at Sprint’s Instinct Web site.

All of these efforts appear to be paying off, at least so far, with hot sales of the Apple iPhone-rivaling touch screen wireless phone.

This success clearly helps for the future, but Sprint still has to be feeling the sting of its past muddled marketing efforts.

In her advertising column, Jennifer Mann mentioned how Sprint fared last year with what could be considered massive spending on marketing.

“While Sprint declined to discuss specifics about its current campaign for Instinct, Advertising Age reports that the telecom giant lost market share, despite spending more on marketing in 2007,” Mann wrote.

“According to the trade publication’s annual slice-and-dice of the 100 leading national advertisers, Sprint upped its 2007 ad spending by almost 5 percent to $1.313 billion, but its market share slipped by 1.7 percent to 21.1 percent of the 255.4 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., according to TNS Media Intelligence.”

After crunching AT&T’s $1.6 billion in spending on so-called measured media and Verizon Wireless’ $1.7 billion, the tally was “Verizon spent the most per market share at $66.80, while Sprint spent $62.30 and AT&T, $57.90.”