Fiddy's giving you the stink eye

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.
 

BOOSH!!!  On Friday, UniversityDecisions.com announced the winner of their Success Yearbook video contest and guess what?  The winner is me, baby…ME!

The $10,000 prize is going to be paid directly to the institution that holds my student loan.  $10,000 in cash would have been nice but I would’ve just blown that money on stupid stuff like tacos and credit card bills.  So I feel like I’m being forced (in a good way) to spend 100% of my winnings responsibly. And I’ll tell you, that 10K is going to take a massive, humongous chunk out of my student loan debt.  It won’t obliterate it completely but it will get me pretty close to the finish line.  And that means this prize is worth way more than $10,000.  It’s going to save me about SEVEN YEARS of student loan payments and thousands of dollars in interest.

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $10,000 towards my student loan:

So this is one of the sweetest victories of my life and it’s significant for me in a few ways. For one thing, $10,000 is actually the largest video contest prize I’ve ever won. In all the years I’ve been entering these contests I’ve never been able to win a prize bigger than $5,000. So now that I’ve been able to break that $5K barrier I feel like I finally have a shot at winning some major contests. This win is also a big deal for me since it pushes my lifetime contest winnings well past the $50,000 mark. I bet there are at least a dozen other filmmakers out there that have won more doing contests than me but if there was a ranking of the top video contest winners of all time I feel like I’d finally be creeping my way up the list.

But the icing on the cake is that I almost didn’t enter this contest.  At least not this time around.  You see originally the sponsor was supposed to run this contest every three months and give out $10,000 four times this year.  I started working on my entry just a week or so before the deadline and votes were supposed to count towards a contestant’s score.  But the rules didn’t say just how important votes were.  Some of the other entries had been up for months so I had to assume they had already gotten a ton of votes.  I put a lot of work into my entry and I didn’t want to lose just because I submitted so late.  So I was thinking maybe I should wait until the next submission period so I could be the first person to upload an entry. That way I could rack up three months worth of votes by the time the next deadline passed.

But I decided to take a gamble and submit now rather than later.  And wouldn’t you know it, after the deadline passed the sponsor canceled the quarterly contest!!  They said that because of the success of the contest they were making it a monthly thing.  But instead of $10,000 they’d only be paying $2,500 towards the monthly winner’s student loan.  I actually think that’s great and a smaller monthly contest is a better idea than a big, quarterly contest.  But if I had waited to enter I would have felt like a freaking moron.  So this win was a real close call.

I still don’t know how important votes were but I think promoting my video on VCN did get me a lot of them. I could tell from my web traffic logs that a lot of people clicked on the link I posted.  So if you voted for me, thanks!  This win really means a lot to me and I appreciate the support.

If you have some student loan debt you should really check this contest out.  You can submit a short essay or a video and very few people are actually shooting videos.  So if you shoot something creative you might have a good shot at winning:

http://www.universitydecisions.com/success-yearbook/Default.aspx

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.

Ok, color me impressed. The deadline to submit to the Pillsbury “Crescent meals” commercial contest was May 10th. But all four winning entries were announced on the contest site, Zooppa.com just one week later. One…week…later.

Anyone who’s entered a video contest before understands why that’s amazing. Video contest results usually take for-freaking-ever to be announced! I’m still waiting to hear about one contest I entered that had a submission deadline in mid-March. That lightning fast Pillsbury announcement becomes even more impressive when you consider that Zooppa received 84 entries for this competition. Sure, each video was only 15 seconds long but that’s still a ton of videos to go through. And Pillsbury actually plans to air the first place video on TV so they couldn’t have made their decision lightly. I saw something on the Zooppa message board that seemed to indicate that most of their contest results are posted really, really soon after their deadlines pass.  One of the most frustrating things about video contests is that we filmmakers are expected to deliver our work by a pre-designated deadline but sponsors usually have no obligation to announce results by a specific date. If I’m going to lose a contest, I’d like to know as soon as possible. Finding out that you lost a contest after 2 months of waiting and wondering and hoping really, really sucks so it’s nice to see a contest site that makes fast results announcements a priority.

Here’s the ad that won the Pillsbury contest. The rules for this one were tight. Each video could only be 15 seconds long and the ad had to show “mom as a character” and include shots of “Pillsbury crescent dogs.” The winning ad is pretty good so I think the quality of this video might have made the decision easy for Pillsbury:

First Place. Prize: $10,000 and ad will air on TV

$5,000 in other prizes were given to 3 runners up. You can see all the winners here:

http://blog.zooppa.com/2010/05/17/pillsbury-winners-cherrish-tomorrow-2/

First Place. Prize: $10,000

I like the winning vid. It’s nice and simple and gets the point across. The other winners and honorable mentions can be seen here: http://www.amdalliance.org/en/film-contest.html

The AMD website said that “more than 40” entries were received for this contest. Since this was kind of a serious topic, that’s a pretty good number. After all, shooting a PSA about people losing their vision isn’t really as fun as making a Butterfinger commercial. Still, I’m surprised more people didn’t go after this one. Since there were 4 cash prizes, anyone who entered would have about a 1 in 4 chance of winning at least a thousand dollars. And you’d have a 1 in 40-something chance of winning 10 grand. Those are amazing odds when you think about it.

If you’ve entered a few video contests but never won one, the best advice I can give is for you to pick your battles more carefully. After watching so many contests play out I’ve realized that most filmmakers who do enter these contests set their price tags way, way too high. I don’t understand why hundreds of people are winning to gamble a Saturday afternoon shooting an entry for a huge-money contest but shooting an entry for a $5,000 contest isn’t worth their time. Just look at the Crash the Superbowl contest. 4,000+ people entered that one last year because millions of dollars were up for grabs. People spent lots of money and time making amazing entries that only had a 1 in 675 chance of making it to the finals. And this year, all but 1 finalist entry won a big cash prize after they scored well on the Ad meter. So the other finalists walked away with just $25K in cash.

So what is smarter to enter? The contest where you have a 1 in 40 chance of winning $10K or the contest where you have a 6 in 4,000 chance of winning $25K…and then a 1 in 2 chance of having your commercial air during the superbowl…and then a 3 in 60 chance of being rated one of the top spots of the game and winning the BIG money?

If you’re a fan of video contests, you know that a lot of them can be sort of frustrating. There are so many ways to screw up a video contest that it’s rare to find one that is run just 100% right. So I decided that maybe we should take a moment every once in a while and profile contests that were done especially well. I thought long and hard about all the contests I’ve entered or read about and one of the best run-contests I’ve ever seen had to be the one that SkinIt.com held earlier this year. I actually ran out of time and didn’t get a chance to shoot an entry for this one but I did pay attention from the sidelines. And I have to say, I was very impressed with the entire operation. SkinIt by the way is a very interesting company. They design stickery-decal like things that you can stick on laptops, ipods, cell phones etc etc. Check out their website to see what I’m talking about. You can even order custom “Skins” and I’ve bought a couple to use in other video contest entries. They’re very handy for dressing up props.

So anyway, what made the Skinit contest so sweet? Well to start, they offered a huge prize for first place; $10,000. That ensured that they would get a mountain of great entries. Then they followed that up by offering large prizes for second and third place (something I always look for since Beardy tends to wind up in 2nd a lot!) They even threw in a $5,000 prize for the best story board idea. Aside from the big prizes though, Skinit did the best thing any company holding a video contest can do; They picked the winners themselves! So Skinit chose to reward quality and not whoever had the willpower to vote for themselves over and over again on youtube.

But that’s enough out of me. Let’s let someone from Skinit tell the rest of the story. Shreya Doshi, one of the organizers of the SkinIt video contest was nice enough to answer a few questions for us and provide a rare look into the other side of video contesting. Next time you see a contest that is being run in a really lame way, you might want to forward the organizers a link to his interview so they can see just what makes a video contest a success.

VCN: Where did the idea come from to hold a video contest to promote Skinit.com? Why did Skinit decide to hold a contest of their own?

SD: Video contests are on the up-and-coming these days – a lot of businesses, small and large, have used them as a way to interact with their customers and build their brand. We wanted to give our customers the chance to contribute to our brand and give them a chance to show us who and what Skinit is to them. We were hoping to open up the creativity gates and see just how much we could do with the Skinit brand, how far we could take a simple product. It’s easy to get stuck in the “same old, same old” when you live and breathe the same concepts day in and day out. Why not let someone fresh take a stab at it? The ideas people came up wit they were definitely refreshing and quite impressive!

VCN: The prize of the contest was very high: $10,000. Plus there was a storyboard competition that had a prize of $5,000. Why did Skinit decided to post such large prizes? I hate to be crude but in the end, did the company get its money’s worth from the contest?

SD: Quality. The prizes were intended to both motivate and reward entrants for quality contributions. We know it isn’t cheap to film and produce a commercial – it involves a lot of resources, time, and effort. It’s important to remember that and make sure we make our contest worth that effort.

VCN: Were you happy with the entries you received?

SD: We definitely received a wide range of entries and I think we ended up with some really professional and fun commercials. We have actually put a couple different ads on the air, not just the winner, and have seen a lot of great response to them! It was really interesting to see the variety of concepts that people came up with and the different ways the Skinit brand was portrayed.

VCN: Filmmakers who enter video contests are usually left in the dark when it comes to how the winners are selected. In the Skinit contest, who picked the winners?

SD: Our judging panel consisted of Paul Buss, CEO of Skinit, Steve Kovsky of San Diego 6 TV (XETV), Pete Weitzner who runs the broadcast journalism program at Chapman University, and Scott Wells, an award-winning commercial director and producer. The goal was to create a panel involving both members of the community and industry specialists that could objectively evaluate the entries.

VCN: How was the judging done? Did the judges all gather together in one place to watch every entry? Or did they watch them on their own? Or maybe the judges only saw a group of finalist videos? (this kind of insight into how a contest is run might seem boring but filmmakers will find it fascinating)

SD: The judges were all given evaluation forms and asked to rate each entry on a scale of 1-6 for each given criteria, including “popularity” based on comments left for each video on the SkinitTV YouTube page. The judges each reviewed the entries individually and then submitted their forms to Skinit. We tallied up the votes and averaged out the scores to determine our top videos. We then had a results meeting with all the judges and revealed the winners. Everyone had a chance to discuss the highs and lows, any surprises, their favorite ads, and their thoughts on the results.

VCN: Which video won the contest? What did everyone at Skinit like best about the entry?

SD: The Grand Prize winner was jaredcicon’s “You Dream It” entry. 1st and 2nd place were actually quite close – within fractions of a point! Made for an interesting discussion during the judges’ results meeting! “You Dream It” had great overall appeal, calling out to all of us who can think of “that crazy Dad.” It not only caught your attention, but held it all the way through the hook. It demonstrated the breadth of our products and the desire of personalization – an important element of the Skinit brand. And of course, it had a memorable punch line with the wife yelling “Jaaaareeedd.” I think that every person I saw watch that ad let out at least a little chuckle when they heard that!

VCN: What were some of the benefits for Skinit for holding a video contest?

SD: Well of course we ended up with some great ads and, like I mentioned earlier, have already aired a few of them – not just “You Dream It.” But beyond that – I think we had our first chance to interact with our customers and get a peek into how they see the Skinit brand. There was a lot of brand exposure for us as well as word of mouth spread and news of the contest got around. We definitely had a lot of fun watching all the entries and seeing the limitless creativity that exists out there. Having been our first contest – we also learned a lot about running contests! A lot of good ideas and entries came from this contest, but we’re hoping to really improve and expand things the next time around…

VCN: Thanks for your time and for setting a great example for other contest-holders!

You can see more Skinit videos and commercials on there youtube channel which is right here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/skinittv

UPDATE:  Looks like Skinit will be doing another video contest next year.  Check out this comment we got from them:  “Wait until you see the 2010 contest- AWESOME PRIZE(s)! Way bigger than last year’s!” Sounds sweet.  Better start thinking up some ideas now!