p.s. I put a link to your blog on the VCK. I hope you don’t mind that I made some Robin Hood references to yourself and I. I will probably keep it there until I can get some advertisers to pay me for some space, but in the meantime while I am a nobody I am putting some links to my contacts there. Once I make the big time of course I won’t even remember your site. {;-])

Jared

Thanks for the comment. I think you’re very right about prize amounts. Things seem to be moving very quickly in the new “consumer-created content” field. This year, $10K was a great prize but if next year a company is looking for a spot that they can actually air on tv, $15K to 25K seems like a good place to start. And really, 50K for a national spot seems like an amazing deal considering how much “real” commercials cost to produce. Along with a larger prize, I really think it’d be great if Skinit promised to air the winning spot like Taxslayer did in 2008. Thanks to doritos and even the success of Amazon’s current Kindle commercial (their big holiday ad for 09 came from a video contest) I think 2010 is going to be a huge year for freelance creatives.

The only thing I am not in agreement with you on, is the prize amount. Let me explain: If you are going to spend the proper amount of time, on writing, pre-production, shooting and post production… for me, a solid national quality commercial takes a good 3 weeks (Minimally) to pull off. After tangible expenses, opportunity costs, and favors that inevitably have to be re-paid, I made about $6,000.00 after taxes. Extrapolated out, this rate of pay is on par with a plumber or tradesman (IF I was able to win EVERY contest I entered). I think we send the wrong message to brands if we tell them that they are providing ‘overly generous’ prize awards at this price/sell point.

I am not suggesting that these brands start offering $300,000.00+ (the industry average for national quality production), but 10 cents on the dollar would be something to aspire to. This potential payday would also give more of a green light on production spending costs which ultimately benefits the brand in the long run. It is not ‘luck’, why Doritos get’s boatloads of super high octane spots.

For the freelance creative, I think the danger of being happy with these smaller creative sales points is that one day the freelance creative genre may be relegated to the same financial status as major market newspaper press photographers. I knew one who would regularly lament how wonderful it was to see his name in a credit line on a front page of a major Newspaper, but also admitted he could barely keep the lights on in his apartment. We creatives are going to start seeing national spots bought and sold for $2,000.00 and $3,000.00 unless as a united body we start to put a value on our intellectual property. It is dangerous to send the signal that we creatives are happy with the minimum wage for our wares.

So yeah, by far, Skinit.com has it going on, relative to other brands, but I def. like the hint they gave of a bigger payday next year.

Jared Cicon (AKA the VCK)