it’s definitely an asset to be able to see things from both perspectives, and we hope and plan to be able to offer both higher purchase prices, as well as gigs, contract jobs and more in the future.

We’re glad you’re a part of things at poptent

I respond to posts like yours because I think we should stimulate the debate about what is the next best step? What things might be possible for us as a union of creatives to increase our compensation. My fear is that we all will regularly start giving these contests better content than what currently passes for national quality (from Mad. Ave.)…….the kind of content they used to pay $300K – $400K for on a regular basis.

I really do hope there will be bigger and bigger paydays down the pike. I think what is going to save us is the natural forces of the market place. When the economy turns around and a 5-10 fold increase in businesses that were previously holding out, finally test the freelance waters. I think paydays will increase in response to demand. I trust market forces much more than kindness or appreciation from brands or marketing companies.

The VCK

Until “User-generated content” becomes a legitimate and reliable product in the eyes of marketing people, prices will stay low. So we have two options; We can refuse our services to all but the companies sponsoring bigger money competitions or we can submit high-quality work to smaller-money competitions and exceed the expectations of the companies that sponsor them.

This time around, coors was locked into to buying 6 ads. If they were forced to buy 6 amateurish, embarrassing ads, what kind of lesson would they walk away with? Would they think “Next time we’ll spend more money and that way we’ll get better submissions?” No. They’d probably think “well that sucked, we’re certainly never doing that again.”

Jared, just think of the Skinit.com contest. You went totally over the top and made a great ad for that company. They got a commercial they could actually air on TV for only $10K. They have seen that $10K can get them some really awesome entries. But apparently the prizes in the 2010 version of the competition are going to be much higher. Why? Because they are satisfied customers. People like you let them know that their faith in “the people” to create good content was justified. So they now feel comfortable taking things to the next level.

Beardy executes the labor described above and succeeds in producing content that a multibillion dollar company like Unilever considers worthy to promote their product(s) to the world.

Is that equitable?

It’s more than a little frustrating when I feel I am the only one who recognizes this usury for what it is.

The VCK

Ok, I’ll bump up my time estimate for the coors videos to 40 hours. I did spent a lot of time posting craigslist ads for extras. And working with the clips provided by coors was a little time consuming. But some of the extras were friends of mine and I had worked with some of the actors before. So most casting was done with a few phone calls/e-mails. The props were already built and just needed to be fixed up some. Since about 50% of the footage in each submission came from coors, I actually only created about 45 seconds of content. The shoots went very fast and including set up, shooting and clean up we were in and out in 5 hours. Even in a controlled setting I shoot like a guerilla filmmaker so I move really fast and try and do things very cheap.

As for keeping the lights on, I did ok this year. In May I decided to start entering as many contests as I could. That turned out to be about 2 or 3 contests a month and I won some kind of prize in about half of them. In maybe 30% of the contests I entered I won at least $1,000.

Some entries I shot for no money and only spent a few hours on. But for some of the big money contests (Doritos, fame, butterfinger) I put a lot of time and money into my productions. Ironically, those were the contests that never paid off. But I still came out ahead. I spent probably $3,000 shooting video contest entries in 2009 and wound up making maybe 1,500 to 2,500 a month between May and December. One month I might only win 500 bucks but the next month I might win 5,000.

And I think 2010 is going to be a much better year. I entered contests willy-nilly in 09 and I’ve learned a lot about which contests to enter and which to avoid. So my plan is to put more energy into fewer contests this year. My goal is to win a big money contest (something with a prize of at least 10K) but until that happens, the smaller contests are keeping me afloat. Plus I’m having fun, building my resume up and improving my skills which are all pretty nice bonuses.