Whenever I’m screwing around on the Internet and I come across an interesting video contest, I bookmark the website and stick it in a folder.  So anytime I’m looking for something to blog about I scroll through those old contest sites and see if any new winners have been announced.

The “Reinvent Riunite” contest has been in my “Closed Contests” folder for a long, long time.  The site says the deadline was December 31^st but I think the winners were just announced recently.  As the name of the contest will tell you, the goal here was to Reinvent Riunite.  If you’re over the age of 40, you probably remember the very 80’s “Riunite on Ice” commercials from 25 years ago.  If you’re under the age of 35, you probably only know that Riunite exist because Cleveland Brown once mentioned that he doesn’t always come home with that “Riunite on ice, that’s nice” mentality on Family Guy.  So Riunite is in serious need of an image update for 2010.  The wine company put up $10,000 for whoever could make an ad that would best appeal to 21^st century consumers.  Here’s the ad they selected:

Winner: First Place.  Prize: $10,000

That was a well shot, nicely edited, ad that featured good, original music.  But did Riunite really need to reach out to “the people” to get an spot like that?  Any 2-bit local production company could plan, shoot and edit that type of web commercial for about 5 grand.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly fine ad but why hold a video contest and give away $10,000 if you just want a commercial that’s perfectly fine?  Ah screw it, it’s too nice outside to care.  It’s memorial day weekend!  And you know what…that ad makes me want to bring some riunite to the Bar-B-ques I’ll be going to.  So there you go, the commercial worked on me.