Earlier this summer, Converse and Target teamed up to hold the “Challenge, Create, Change” video contest. Participants were supposed to “Demonstrate how they are challenging, creating or changing something in their worlds.” Filmmakers could submit comedies, documentaries, short films, animations or “anything in between.”

The prizes were pretty big: Grand Prize would get you Ten Grand, a trip for two to the Wanderlust Festival in Lake Tahoe and a thousand dollar Target gift card. 1st place was good for five grand and a trip to Wanderlust and 2nd place got two grand and the trip.

In all, Converse and Target got more than 450 entries! That is a TON! This should be a lesson to all those video contest organizers who wind up frustrated and disappointed that they only get 6 crappy entries. If you offer some great prizes, people will come out of the woodwork to make videos for you.

So Converse/Target were smart about how to lure in filmmakers but then they blew it when it came time to picking the winner. All top three videos were selected by YOUTUBE VOTES. Uck. When they say “Winners will be selected by the youtube audience” that really means “Whoever wants to waste the most time creating fake youtube accounts so you can vote over and over gets 10 grand.”

The videos that went on to win are….OK. They aren’t obscenely bad but they aren’t insanely awesome either. They are just….ok. The third one at least has some cool special effects but basically all three of the winning videos are pretty darn boring. They are long as hell too. Anyway, here’s another lesson to video contest organizers; if you let “people” on youtube alone pick the winners in your contest, here’s the type of results you can expect:

Grand prize. $10,000:

1st Place.  $5,000:

2nd Place.  $2,000:

To be fair, it seems like converse/target first selected a group of finalists that youtubers could vote on but any time you leave the final decision up to “voters” the winners will always be the people who either have a huge social network to rely on or who are the best at stuffing the ballot box without getting caught.

The other finalists and all the other submitted videos can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ConverseOneStar