If you haven’t heard about the race between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@cnnbrk) to 1,000,000 followers on Twitter you must have been camping in the woods for the past week. Ashton was on Oprah (@oprah) and got her to send her first tweet – how can you ignore that?!

While millions of people still don’t get it, this is a BIG deal. This has nothing to do with Ashton himself. You don’t have to be a fan of his work. It’s about a major shift in control that’s taking place. Ashton definitely gets it as he explained in his live victory broadcast last night.

“The old guard has passed and the new guard is here.. We can and will create our media… We can and will broadcast our media. We can and will censor our own media ourselves. We are over a million.”

It was a defining moment for media and the buzz and retractions have already started.

Obviously, we’re huge fans of Twitter. Watching Ashton live last night was more exciting than watching the countdown to 2000. But, as my wife likes to point out, not everyone thinks it a big deal. That’s where Mr. Kutcher’s ingenious marketing head kicked in. He knew that there must be a way he could leverage the media attention that the race was getting. What originally started as a joke could end up saving millions of lives – seriously.

That little video spawned the David vs. Goliath challenge that had us on the edge of our seats. Ashton brilliantly leveraged the attention to support a cause that is obviously important to him – ending malaria. He committed to make a donation of 10,000 nets to protect people from the disease and that started the ball rolling. Already, many high-profile folks have matched or exceeded Ashton’s donation. Oprah committed 20,000, CNN matched with 10,000 and it’s only been a few hours.

It’s safe to say that the organization Ashton is supporting, malarianomore.org, is seeing more visitors and donations than ever. The charity acted quickly to capitalize on the attention. Realizing that most of their traffic would come as a result of the Twitter news, their site has prominent tie-ins to Ashton and Twitter, they make it easy to follow and donate and they even promote Twitter profile backgrounds to help spread their message.

As a marketer, you have to appreciate it at so many levels. Here at Tweamr, we talk a lot about ‘harnessing the power of Twitter.’ Could there be a better example? Congratulations Ashton on a job extremely well done.