Companies love holding video contests for lots of reasons. But probably the biggest benefit for them is that for just a few grand they get dozens or sometimes hundreds of free commercials for their products posted to the web. They may only feature the winning video on their website but what about all the non-winning videos? Those are still on the web promoting the featured company for FREE.

So it always confuses me when a contest won’t let you see the other videos that have been submitted. Maybe they think that people will be discouraged from entering if they see that lots of greats entries have already been posted. They do sort of have a point there. If you’re thinking about shooting an entry for a contest the smart thing to do is size up the competition first. In a bigger competition like the Jim Beam Remake contest there might be an entire website dedicated to showcasing submitted entries. But usually, contest rules just say you should upload your video to youtube and send them a link. In that scenario, all you have to do is go to youtube, search for the name of the contest and you’ll see all the other entries.

But sometimes video contest organizers just want to keep the videos as a surprise I guess. For instance, a few months back I entered the Careerbuilder.com “Hire My TV Ad” superbowl commercial contest. You had to upload your entry to Carrerbuilder’s youtube account and then the videos were all set to private until the submission period was over.

So what do you do when you want to scope out the competition when the submitted videos aren’t available for public viewing? Or what if the rules state that you can upload your video to ANY video hosting site. What can you do then?

You can go to Truveo, that’s what you can do:

http://www.truveo.com/

Truveo is an ingeniously simple idea for a website and it’s a perfect tool for video contest addicts. It’s a video search engine that scours the web for videos that are relevant to your search term. Whether your competition uploads their videos to youtube, vimeo, myspace etc etc etc, you’ll be able to find them. Filter the results by “most recent” and you’ll almost certainly see nothing but entries for the contest you’re in or thinking of entering.

But what about the careerbuilder scenario? When the contest organizers keep all the entries private Truveo won’t be able to find them. Well creative types have a need for their work to be seen. I know I do. So when a contest keeps the entries private, I always upload my video to my own youtube account. Turns out, a lot of people do the same thing. In my own experience, whenever I shoot a video contest entry everyone who was in it or who helped with it want to know when they can see the finished product. Are filmmakers supposed to tell their collaborators to wait a few weeks until the contest organizers unveil all the entries? Of course not. We just throw our videos up on the web somewhere and send links just to our friends and allies.

So even if a contest’s entries aren’t up for public viewing yet you should still be able to find a lot of them thanks to truveo. And as a bonus, filmmakers who are especially proud of their work seem to be the most likely to post their videos to their own channels and video accounts. So not only will truveo help you find your competition, it will help you find the BEST of the submitted videos.