Today at 12pm Eastern, Gain detergent unveiled the 25 finalists in their million dollar, “Smell Like a Million Bucks” video contest. But it’s not the “Top 25″ that anyone following this contest could have expected. It now looks like Gain disqualified many of the entries that seemed like they were a safe bet to make the finals.
Gain was supposed to determine their finalists like this: each video would be given a creative score when it was submitted. The score was based on a 5-star system. Those stars were then converted to a percentage. So if you got 5 stars, your score was 100%. If you got 2 1/2 stars, your score was 50%. Next, Gain took the number of views your video got during the contest-long viewing period and multiplied that number by your creative score. So if you got 2,000 views and a creative score of 20%, your final score was 400. According to the rules, this was the only method Gain would use to select their Top 25 finalists.
So if a video could get 5,000 views, there was no way it would NOT make the finals, right? Even if a video had a creative score of 10%, 5,000 views would still give you a huge, final score. But real views were actually tremendously hard to get in this contest. For a view to be registered, a person had to log into facebook, accept the contest app, find the video they wanted to view and then watch it all the way to the end. But while it was hard to get genuine views, it was really, really easy to generate fake views. All a person had to do was create a few dozen or a few hundred fake facebook accounts and spend hours and hours watching their video every day for weeks. And it looks like that’s exactly what a lot of people did. But what those repeat-viewers didn’t realize is that it is really easy to detect that kind of cheating. The third-party company running the contest application is able to see where views come from. So if some idiot viewed their entry 50 times a day from the same computer, that would raise a big red flag even if they used 50 separate facebook accounts. But it seems like there were a whole lot of idiots in this contest because for some mysterious reason, most of the “most viewed” videos did not make the finals.
Last Monday, as soon as the viewing period ended, all of the view counts on all of the entries disappeared. I suspected that might happen so a few hours before the deadline, I took a screen shot of the 12 “most viewed” entries in the Gain contest. The Red X’s indicate which of these “popular” entries did not make the finals and the Green Checks indicate the videos that did make the finals.
The (almost) final view counts of the 12 "most viewed" entries. I added the Red X's and Green checks to indicate the videos that did and did not make the finals
Take a look at those view counts. Some of them are ridiculously high. The video in first place has 8,449 views! But out of the 480 videos that were submitted, only 22 had view counts higher than 1,000. So 8,449 views is unnaturally high. Now, many of these videos were actually pretty great. And really, all of them are at least kind of decent. But even if these videos all sucked and even if they recived a 10% creative score, 10% of 4,000 is 400. And gain actually picked several finalist videos that had FEWER than 400 views.
So all of these Red X’ed videos must have been disqualified. Gain of course can’t reveal WHY these entries didn’t make the Top 25 but there are only 3 explanations:
1. An entry could have gotten a creative score of ZERO.
2. An entry could be disqualified for cheating.
3. An entry could have been disqualified for breaking other rules like using “third party content” (music, images, SFXs) the entrant didn’t own.
There is no way any of these entries were bad enough to deserve a creative score of zero so reason #1 can’t possibly explain what happened. Some of these entries do use “third party content” but a lot of the the videos in the finals do. (Like this one) So I don’t think Gain disqualified any of these submissions because they broke other rules. So…that only leaves cheating.
I kept a close eye on the view count race in this contest and I can tell you, it looked like there was massive amounts of cheating happening. Some videos recived 100′s of views every day like clockwork. Others would suddenly gain 200 views in the middle of the night. There was even one video that got just about 270 views every day! What are the odds that the same number of people would watch the same video every day for several days in a row? Or how about the video that was the 3rd Most Viewed? That video has nothing in it that could possibly cause it to be disqualified. That video was approved on June 22nd and by the view count deadline of July 11th, they had 5,150 views. Does 257 views A DAY really seem realistic when most entries in this contest weren’t able to get 257 views during the entire viewing period?
So did all those people with Red X’s on their videos really cheat and fake their views? There’s no way for us to know. For the record, I’m not saying any of those people cheated for sure. But the evidence suggests that they did SOMETHING to break the rules of the contest that got them disqualified. I do want to say that I do NOT believe that the 2nd most viewed video cheated. It was created by a reader of this site named Andrew D. and I know that he had an army of people working on getting him a lot of views. But I do know that other contestants were trying to get him disqualified because he posted his video to youtube and that was sort of against the rules. So, I think he might have been bounced on a technicality.
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I actually entered this contest but I submitted my entry way too late. I only managed to get about 400 views so I didn’t make the Top 25. However, I absolutely have to applaud Gain and the company running the contest, Don Jagoda Associates for doing the right thing here. It was against the rules to “view” your video over and over using fake accounts so anyone who did that deserved to be disqualified. It’s nice to see that some companies actually care about running a fair, online contest.
HOWEVER…I also have to CONDEMN Gain for basically lying to contestants about how they were going to determine the winners. Even if Gain had to disqualify dozens and dozens of entries, there is simply no way that a video like this should have or could have made the finals:
Click to view
This video only received about 200 views. So even if it got a perfect, 100% creative score, it still would have only had a creative score of 200 which wasn’t supposed to be enough to get it in the top 25. But this video is so amazingly awful that there is no way it got a perfect creative score. So how and why did it ever make the finals?
It’s clear that something seriously unethical did happen here. Gain lied to their customers about how the winners would be picked. So what can you do about it? Jack shit, that’s what! The finalists have been picked and there’s nothing you can do to fight Gain’s terrible decisions.
And so, the real contest now begins! To be honest, I’m actually kind of relived I didn’t make it to the finals now that I know that Gain is willing to play fast and loose with the rules. And on top of Gain’s shadiness, votes alone determine the winner of this contest. So I can’t even imagine how horrible the next 2 weeks are going to be for the people in the finals. If a finalist wants to have any chance of winning, they’re going to have to spend at least 60 hours a week begging for votes. And if someone isn’t willing to work that hard on their campaigns, they might as well not even bother. Because somewhere, among the finalists there are surely several people who ARE ready to take the next 2 weeks off from work and do nothing but scrounge for votes. One of the people listed on this page is going to win a million dollars: I can’t tell you specifically who the winner will be but I can tell you this, the prize will go to whoever is smart enough not to cheat and whoever is determined enough to dedicate every waking hour for the next 2 weeks to winning that million bucks.
Later this week I’m going to announce my picks and predictions for this contest. So if you made the finals and want to let me know why you think you’re going to take home that million bucks, let me know: .
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Actually I believe Andrew did break the rules. Someone on another board mentioned that he was giving away t-shirts to people who voted for him. This not only breaks Facebook’s giveaway rules- I think the person mentioned it was against the Gain contest rules as well.
That’s too bad because it was a great video. He probably didn’t need to give away free t-shirts to make it to the top 25.
Seems like Gain is getting a ton of bad press over this! Too bad for them. This could have been a way for them to really capitalize on user created content.
Rene
I didn’t enter the contest because I’ve been through difficult periods of finding people to vote. BUT, wouldn’t it be a sweet strategy to say “let’s band the top 25 together, not stress, and split the million dollars between everyone. I would take $40,000 any day. All voting contests are about is the company taking advantage of the artist…I know it would never work but if someone presented that to me as an option and everyone was down for it I would totally choose that route.
Hey Beardy!
You were right as usual my man. It DID get ugly. Have you seen Gain’s wall??
great post per usual Beardy,I also had a video in the contest that did not make the top 25, but I LOVED Andrew’s video, it was very good and I am shocked its not up there.
I’m not sure how giving away t-shirts is really against the rules, I guess that could be considered buying votes, but at the end of the day how could GAIN prove he was giving away shirts? He uploaded in the very beginning of the entry period, he was literally like the 2nd video to post so he had plenty of time to get votes. I have another theory, and Beardy you touched upon this topic before, but I think his video was too good, it didn’t feel consumer generated enough, I know that sounds crazy but if GAIN put that in the top 25 it would have most likely won in a landslide, so by never sharing the “creative score” then they can simply adjust the numbers or like you said, disqualify it on a technicality.
also, a few of the finalists have their video on youtube, so i don’t think that made a difference.
Rene,
Giving away prizes to people who viewed a video was NOT mentioned in the rules. If they DQ’d andrew D. because of that Gain could get sued for breach of contract.
Ryan,
The million bucks is being paid out of 10 years. So that 40K would be paid out as 10, $4,000 checks over the next 10 years. I think most people would rather just take their chances and go for the million.
and 1 millions after taxes is about 540K
This contest was a disgrace! Gain and Proctor and Gamble should be ashamed of themselves. I feel like they stole my time and my friends’ time. Views clearly had no influence on their decisions. Why even say you are going to use a formula to pick the winners and then not use it? This was a total scam and I will never buy another bottle of gain as long as I live. I’m a tide girl from now on.
WOW good article, I will be honest when I decided to enter the GAIN contest I only viewed a few of the random videos before entering. I never clicked the most viewed tab. After I finished the song I called my wife in the room to let her hear the song I just made. She wanted to see some of the other contestants so as I clicked through the videos there were sevral people on a webcams just saying “I use GAIN and I smell like a million bucks” for 5 seconds, and we felt great about my song and what video we could shoot with it. Then my wife saw the “most viewed” tab…when I saw Andrews video I almost did not bother entering and if I had seen it before I had already finished my song and was not already alf way done, I would not have entered. His video was that intimidatingly good…(is that a word?) Anywho either by gods good grace or me just being a moron I luckily did not see his superb entry before i finished my song. Here is the link to my vid any support would be appreciated
I do want to pay off my house…i am done paying a bank intrest that refuses to modify a loan for a guy wo pays his bills!
We posted the video with the guy in the orange shirt as the thumbnail (Meet Ted..). I’d like to say I find this article interesting and a good read but I can SAFELY say we DID NOT create “hundreds of fake FB accounts” and cheat. We simply asked our audience. We posted this video JUST on the Gain FB page and NOWHERE ELSE. We did NOT offer anyone ANYTHING for voting other than a “Thank You”. I was SHOCKED when I saw the Top 25 honestly. I am not saying that I thought we deserved more than any other contestant but I expected to see more than ONE Top viewed video in there. I do not think ANY of the Most Viewed Contestants should be considered “sore losers” as this contests’ judging methods seemed a bit off.
Again great read!
Thanks
I had the following mindset before making the vid: “Gain will choose the videos they want”. With the creative score, they gave themselves that power. I get that Gain wants to keep video maker enthusiasm high and get as many entries as possible made and shared. It’s just disappointing when you don’t know why some entries were picked and other’s weren’t.
I’m sad. I was really pleased with how my Gain rap video turned out.
Also: That Andrew D entry is just a wicked awesome slaughterfest of win. How in the world did Gain not show that guy love?!?
Yes Beardy…all I am saying is that the top 25 should not play into Gain’s game…
i told you this thing was convoluted from the start. there is no way i would of wasted my time on it.
A simple JUDGING PANEL would have made this disaster contest into an awesome event that even I would have participated in. This could have rivaled the Doritos contest.
They’re more worried about entrants pimping their video (Thus promoting their product) then a smooth running simple contest that will draw top creators for awesome quality video spots. I can’t believe how bad the finalist video is that you posted Beardy, so ridiculous! Yours was certainly wayyy better.
Again, I’m so glad I foresaw this mess and stayed away from it. When will Brands learn?
Pimping charities and sick children to win is wrong no matter how good the intentions seem or how great the entry is/was.
Using Charities and babies ain’t right,
I don’t like anonymous slams in my comment section. WordPress tells me that your comment came from an IP address in Pensacola, Florida. I noticed that one of the Top 25 finalists, BRIAN P. is from Pensacola. Here’s his entry:
You (or your friend) made the finals. There’s no need to rub it in.
I can guarantee my friend’s video (Georgette H.) did not cheat. Your insinuating that makes you sound like a sore loser. If asking your friends in person and IM to go vote on your video makes you a cheater, then everyone needs to be disqualified.
Also, that’s a cute video. Regular people making an effort. It’s simple and to the point, and reminiscent of oldschool daytime commercials. I ain’t biased, this is a case of “u mad”.
Kattywampus,
Did you actually read through this post before leaving your comment? I’m guessing you skimmed the article, saw the word “cheated” and then saw your friend’s video. Because I did not say (or even imply) that Georgette H. cheated.
My point was that her video was so poorly made and had so few views that there was no way it could have made the Gain finals IF GAIN HAD USED THE SCORING SYSTEM THEY SAID THEY’D USE. Gain did something wrong when they threw out their rules to pick her video, not her. Her video only had about 200 views. So even if she got a perfect creative score, Georgette H. would have only had a final score of 200. Did you read the rules of the contest? Go here and click on the “How to Win” button:
Again, I do not think Georgette H. cheated. People cheated by using fake accounts to get fake views since views were supposed to be part of a video’s score. She only had 200 views and some videos had 5,000 views. The 5,000 view videos are the ones that probably cheated.