It seems like a lot of bands are running music video contests these days and I always stay far away from them. Producing 3 or 4 minutes of interesting video content is pretty damn hard. And for some weird reason, the prizes are usually pretty small. Ringo Starr just ran a music video contest for his new song “Wings” and even though Ringo has got to be like a mega-super-millionaire the grand prize was only $3,000. I happen to think Ringo is awesome and I doubt he had much to do with the contest. But these small prizes just guarantee that there won’t be too many great entries. Of course, the winner does get a credit as the director of Ringo’s official music video. And that’s pretty sweet. But that credit kind of seems less impressive if you know the video was made for a contest.
Anyways, like I said, Ringo is cool. And the video he made to announce the winner of his contest is pretty funny. You can tell that someone probably just pulled him into his backyard to shoot this. Then even though a incredibly loud plane flies right overhead, Ringo kept going. So one take was all that Ringo had time for. But he does say something pretty perfect at the end that saves the whole video:
And now here’s the music video that won the contest. As you’ll hear/see, this was a really hard song to make a video for since there were long breaks where there weren’t any lyrics:
You can read the details of the contest or see more entries right here. Peace and love, peace and love, peace and love.
This spring Pringles ran the biggest contest in the history of Tongal and paid out $45,000 in prize money. Pringles picked 16 winning videos and featured them in a campain they called the “Tournament of Flavors.” Facebook Fans were asked to vote for their favorite flavor-themed shorts until just one submission was left standing. Here’s the video that won the tournament:
That was pretty cool. But that video didn’t actually win he contest. The “tournament” was just kind of for fun. Voters had the chance to win prizes but the filmmakers didn’t win anything in the facebook poll. Pringles picked their winners on Tongal before the tournament was even launched. Ten videos earned $50o, four got $1,000 and then the top five were award prizes ranging from $2,000 to $12,500. The above video came in 3rd and the director (hey, it was the same guy that made this great Hoverboard video and this amazing Duct Tape video) won $3,000. Here’s the video that won the actual contest:
First Place Winner. Prize: $12,500:
Man, I really liked that one. It was very well made and felt so genuine despite the absurd subject matter. Actually, almost all of the 16 winners are pretty well done. Some people really went all out and did incredibly elaborate submissions. You can see all the winning videos right here. But be warned: watching all 16 of these videos will probably make you want to eat some pringles as soon as possible. Damn I wish I had tube of Sour cream and onion right now.
In North Korea, schoolchildren are required to perform complex song and dance routines in praise of their “dear leader.” Fortunately here in America we don’t make our kids do that kind of stuff. No, our kids just have to sing and dance in praise of corporations. I just read that back in December, Dole ran a video contest in which schools were supposed to organize “flash mob” performances about healthy lifestyles (and their products, of course). This is from a press release put out by the sponsor:
Dole created the DOLE Fruit Flash Mob Video Contest to encourage students to make healthy meal choices as part of a healthy lifestyle. The contest incorporated fruit and fruit themes into the contemporary and fun entertainment of a flash mob performance (a spontaneous song and dance that erupts in an unsuspecting crowd). Contest rules required that both school foodservice staff and students participate in the video on location in school’s cafeteria/dining room.
The winners of the contest were determined by Dole. Here’s the video they picked. Skip to the middle for the singing and dancing action.
FIRST PLACE WINNER. PRIZE: $1,000 and 10 cases of fruit cups.
Maybe I’m too uptight but to me, that seemed kind of creepy. For christsakes, a cafeteria full of kids had to get up and dance and sing for a thousand bucks and a few cases of fruit cups??? How much time and energy did they all have to put into learning that routine? Yeah sure, the kids probably had fun but as an outside observer, this just feels wrong. Do we really live in a country where little kids have to perform in mini-Hunger Games just to get some free fruit from a company that has revenues of about 7 Billion dollars a year? If Dole wanted to encourage kids to eat better, couldn’t they just GIVE AWAY a few dozen cases of fruit cups? What good does it do to make little kids sing and dance and compete for such a meager prize? Oh right….this flash mob video contest was about publicity and not about getting kids to eat better. I’m guessing Dole will get a lot more than $1,000 of free advertising out of this whole thing.
And that’s the problem with contests like this. Kids should NOT be participating in these types of contests because video contests are just another form of advertising. Except in video contests, the kids actually become part of the ads. I’m going to guess that the school didn’t get all the kids’ parents to sign consent and release forms. So most parents probably didn’t understand that their kids were going to be in a viral video promoting Dole. If I had kids and I found out that their school was making them participate in something like this I’d totally flip out. I’ll say it as plainly as I can: CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE CORPORATE SHILLS.
But hey, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe next year Dole should run a contest where schools get one case of fruit cups for every student that agrees to wear a Dole t-shirt for a month straight. The kids would get something to eat and Dole would get a bunch of tiny, walking billboards! It’d be a win-win!
Whenever a winning video contest entry winds up on TV it’s a big deal. For the second time this year, Chevy has decided to start airing a commercial that won one of their Mofilm contests. Last time it was “Happy Grad” which aired during the Super Bowl. This time it’s the Chevy Volt commercial “Zombie Ride” by Josh Soskin. The ad won first place, $8,000 and a trip for two to Spain in Mofilm’s Barcelona competition. It looks like “Zombie Ride” was shot in Southern California but it definitely has a cool, European vibe to it. The spot is scheduled to start airing as part of a “European-wide” campaign in a few weeks. Over the years I’ve probably seen hundreds of video contest entries that featured zombies but this one actually managed to feel totally unique and fresh. I can’t embed the video so click the image to check it out:
Like I said, click this image to view
Pretty awesome, no? Good thing that wasn’t Lori from the Walking Dead driving that Volt otherwise she would have flipped the car after going like 40 feet down the road. If you don’t get that joke you need to watch a lot more TV.
Man, I must be slipping. EHarmony’s Viral Video contest is just the sort of contest I like to enter. They wanted wacky short films about eHamorny rather than traditional ads. But somehow, I totally missed this one. Judges picked four finalists and then the public chose the ultimate winner. The video that won the popular vote is amusing and pretty well done.
Eharmony’s First Place Winner. Prize: $8,000:
The winning filmmaker, Steven Huffaker actually shot two entries for this contest and his non-winning submission is so weird I had to post it too. As a short film, I think it’s pretty good but as a video contest entry, it’s totally insane. There is no panel of contest judges with balls big enough to put their company’s stamp of approval on a video that points out that Jesus’ death on the cross maybe wasn’t such a big sacrifice since he knew he was the son of God and that he’d be resurrected. Yes…for serious.
UPDATE: Hey now, the director of these two videos left a comment last night and said that the he shot the Jesus ad just for fun. It wasn’t actually a submission. That actually makes me like that video even more than I already did since it was just a crazy short film and not a contest entry.
My friends all know that I’m a video contest nut so every so often someone will hear about a contest and send me a link. A few weeks ago, I got a message from a friend telling me that 50 Cent was holding a video contest on facebook to promote some crappy energy drink company that he owns (what is it with celebrities starting energy product companies??) and that I should enter and try and win the $10,000 prize. So I checked out the rules and man….was I turned off by what I read. I’ve come to accept the fact that most big-money video contests involve public voting, but for some insane reason, people were allowed to vote up to 10 TIMES A DAY for the same video. So instead of begging friends for just one vote, contestants were expected to beg their friends to vote for them 10 times a day, every day for weeks. And to make matters even worse, the voting was happening during the submission period. That means that anyone who entered in the first few days would have an enormous advantage over everyone else in the contest. In fact, when I first learned about this contest I looked at some of the “most popular” submissions and some videos already had thousands and thousands of votes.
When all was said and done, 300 videos were submitted but over ONE MILLION votes were cast! According to my calculator, that’s 3,333 votes per entry. A million votes in a contest with a $10,000 prize is freaking ridiculous. Luckily, I didn’t waste my time and enter this train wreck of a contest. But I still feel bad for the 300 suckers that wasted their time (and their family and friends’ time) trying to win 50 Cent’s ten grand. My friend who told me about this contest is a pretty smart guy but even he didn’t bother to look into HOW a person was supposed to win the grand prize. Like most of the people who probably entered, he just heard that 50 Cent was holding a big video contest and got excited. So the lesson for today is look before you leap. I bet most of the people who entered the Street Kings contest shot entries and THEN read the fine print that explained what they needed to do to win.
Here’s the video that wound up receiving the most votes. It’s actually pretty decent. I’m guessing the guy who made this knew exactly what he was getting into when he decided to shoot a submission:
First Place Winner. Prize: $5,000 & trip to NYC to meet Mr. Cent:
Like I said, that was pretty good. But I’ve certainly never seen so much gun play in a video contest entry before. A lot of contests straight up prohibit the depiction of firearms or realistic violence but this contest was sponsored by 50 Cent’s company so I guess Fiddy obviously doesn’t really mind if people associate him or his “brand” with firearms.
Last August I did a post about the amazing video that won Tongal’s “Stuck on Duct Tape” contest. It was entitled “Duct Tron” and it featured some incredible stop motion animation and ridiculously brilliant surprise ending. Well the director who made that ad, David Brashear just won another Tongal contest and once again is work is extremely worthy of a blog post. Here’s his first place entry in Tongal’s BodyArmor contest.
BodyArmor’s First Place winner. Prize: $7,500:
Pretty damn good, huh?? The thing that I love about that video is that it’s almost certainly based on a 20 year old urban legend. Back when I was in grade school, I can remember kids talking about the hover boards that appeared in Back to the Future II. The rumor was that the hoverboards in the movie were real but they were illegal in America because they were too dangerous. Just a few years ago I learned that this hoverboard myth came directly from the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis. According to Michael J. Fox, Zemeckis got tired of explaining how the hoverboard special effects were done in BTTFII so he just started saying that Hoverboards were real. He went so far as to declare in some Back to the Future TV special the hoverboards were a real thing but toy companies couldn’t sell them because parents groups wouldn’t let them. You can read a whole lot more about this weird story here. That page includes a video that Zemeckis produced as “proof” that hoverboards existed. Watch it closely and you’ll see that the director of the Body Armor video probably drew a little inspiration from it.
A dozen (!) other videos won prizes in this contest ranging from $3,000 to $500. A lot of them are also pretty good so you might want to check them out. Actually, you might want to just head over to Tongal so you can take a look at some of the contests they’re currently running. I’m really impressed with how that site has grown in the last year. They keep announcing one huge contest after another and the prize amounts keep going up and up. I just checked and it looks like almost all of their current contests offer top prizes of at least $10,000. So…that’s pretty nice. http://tongal.com/projects
I don’t know much about basketball but I have picked up on the fact that Lebron James is considered to be one of the biggest jerks in the NBA. Well now it seems like he’s trying to become known as one of the biggest jerks in advertising. Last fall, Adweek ripped apart the ad campaign for a company that James represents and co-founded; Sheets Energy Strips. The site called their “I Take a Sheet…” campaign “the low point in 2011 advertising.“ If you’re not familiar with Sheets they are these little strips that you pop in your mouth. They’re just like those breathe strip things but these are filled with caffeine. The whole ad campaign for Sheets is based on an weird, poop-centric puns. Millions of people around the country have had crap like this forced into their brain over the last few months…..
Get it? It's a pun on "taking a shit!"
If forcing people at bus stops to picture middle aged ladies taking dumps on the floor of a library wasn’t bad enough, the geniuses at Sheets decided to expand their campaign with a new national TV commercial. But I guess that the 15 million dollars Lebron made last year (just from playing for the Heat) wasn’t enough to actually pay for an ad. So the Sheets team decided to exploit desperate filmmakers by holding an idiotic video contest. People were supposed to shoot 30 second commercials for Sheets and then get all their friends to vote for their entry. The ads that had the most facebook likes would go on to the finals and then Lebron and a few other celebrity judges (if you consider a guy named “PitBull” a celebrity) would choose the winner. The winning ad would then play on TV and in movie theaters nationwide.
Normally, a “low budget” TV commercial will cost tens of thousands of dollars produce. And decent ads can sometimes even cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Just think about it….the sponsor has to pay SAG wages, they have to hold auditions, hire hair and make up people, get permits, rent equipment, hire a director that’s in the DGA and pay a small army of tech people to shoot and edit the thing. So getting a commercial from a video contest can save a company a small fortune. Even if they put up a prize of say $10,000, that’s nothing compared to what it would cost to fund a “professional” spot.
But the people Sheets didn’t think an “amateur” ad was worth even a measly grand. That’s right….there was no cash prize in this contest. Sheets wanted filmmakers to produce a TV quality commercial for them and then get everyone they know to like Sheets’ facebook page and vote for their entry and then sign the rights away so Sheets could use their work for ZERO dollars. The fact that the commercial would air on TV was supposed to be enough of an honor, I suppose. Oh, but at least the six finalists each won a pair of headphones. That seems totally fair, right?
The Sheets commercial contest ended last week and here’s the ad that the judges picked as the winner. I watched some of the other entries and this was really the only finalist that was even commercial-like, if ya know what I mean. One of the 6 finalist ads was like 34 seconds long. So pretty much this was the only viable, air-able entry I saw.
Sheets Contest Winner. Prize: Jack Sheet:
I think it’s absolutely awesome when companies “crowdsource” their ads but every once in a while you get some shitty company like Sheets that just wants to use filmmakers so they can get something for nothing. Folks seriously, if you ever see a video contest where the sponsors are offering a prize of zero dollars, don’t enter. If they think your work is literally worthless, don’t give it to them. I know that it might be cool to see your commercial air on TV but it probably won’t help your career in the long run. No potential employer is going to be impressed with the fact that you won a video some prize-less video contest because you were able to get the most facebook votes.
