We’ll get back to covering the Taxslayer contest fiasco next week (actually, I managed to work some taxslayer stuff into this post after all) but for now I thought I’d cover a video contest that actually has its act together; the 2010 Skinit.com Spotlight video challenge.

I was really impressed with last year’s skinit video contest.  It went very smoothly and they got a ton of great entries.  I even posted an interview with one of the contest organizers and soon after, I got word that an even bigger version of the contest was planned for 2010.  Well, Skinit certainly delivered on their promise.  Last year the grand prize was 10 grand.  This year they are giving out SIX prizes of $5,000 each plus one grand prize of $20,000.  Yesterday, everyone who is on the taxslayer mailing list got an e-mail reminder about the nearing contest deadline.  One of the many reasons I’m annoyed about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest is that instead of shooting TWO entries for them, I could have spent my time making entries for the Skinit contest.  Well, there’s still 16 days to go and my “skins” are in the mail, so I should be able to get an entry in at the last minute.

One thing that really amazed me about last year’s skinit contest was that they actually TOLD YOU WHO WAS JUDGING IT!  If you enter a lot of contests you know how frustrating it is to not know who was passing judgment on your work.  In the reminder e-mail, skinit once again announce who this year’s judges are:

These people are all happy because the don't work for taxslayer.com

That e-mail also did crazy things like give handy tips you could follow to keep your entry from being disqualified.  They also included <gasp> an e-mail address you could send questions to!!  The taxslayer contest not only didn’t provide an e-mail address for questions, their website said that any questions you sent them will be ignored!  In fact, the entire taxslayer contest site had kind of a rude, adversarial tone to it.

I never really thought about this before but I guess you can see a lot of the organizer’s personalities in the contests they set up.  As I’ve learned, the head of the taxslayer contest is a mean, rude jerk who likes to ignore contestants and (allegedly) mock them and harass them.  The one time I got him on the phone I could hear anger in his voice…before he hung up on me, I mean.  The head of the taxslayer contest, Daniel Eubanks is also in charge of taxslayer’s auto racing endeavors.  So I suspect that the annual video contest is just a hassle that he gets stuck with every year.  Maybe that’s why the contest rules were so confusing.  Maybe he was sick of the contest so he sabotaged it so that the company would drop the idea already so he could get back to blogging about race cars!

The people at Skinit though seem to actually enjoy running their video contest.  They clearly respect the people that are spending time and money to make commercials for them.  Unlike taxslayer, they seem to actually want people to enter their contest.  OH!  You know what?  I think I get it; the people at skinit are probably really used to working with artists because that’s who designs all their skins.  So they understand how creative people think and how they deal with things like requirements and deadlines.  But the people at Taxslayer (AKA Rhodes Financial Services) are all money-minded people who live in a world of facts and figures.  Daniel Eubanks probably never has to deal with creative people.  That must be why it was so easy for them to cancel their video contest!  Obviously, their NUMBERS told them the best thing to do would be to cut their losses and maybe pick up a few entries on the cheap later in the year.  They clearly didn’t care about wasting a bunch of filmmakers time and money.  It wasn’t their time and money so why should they worry about it?  Their reputation might take a hit but right now, they’ll save a few grand.

Ahem…anywho, you’ve still got about two weeks to get your skinit entries in.  Head here for more details:  http://www.skinit.com/landing_page.php?id=TVspotlight_home