Yesterday I explained that on Wednesday night, CBS seemed to reveal 2 of the 3 winners of the Crash the Superbowl contest in their special “The Superbowl’s Greatest commercials.” Near the end of the show they featured a montage of new commercials explaining it was a “sneak peek” of ads that were going to air during the big game on Sunday. Two of the commercials in the montage were Crash the Superbowl finalists: Snack Attack Samurai and Kids These Days.
One of the most interesting things about the Doritos contest is that no one, not even the finalists are supposed to know who won until the three winning ads appear on TV during the Superbowl. However, the 6 videos that made it to the finals were also supposed to be kept secret but USA Today revealed one finalist (“Casket”) early in a story about Superbowl ad sales. So it seems that Doritos may be trying to milk the CTSB contest for all its worth by seizing every media opportunity that is presented to them, even if they have to share a few secrets to ensure coverage.
Possible case in point, I saw this really weird article from of all places, the Sacramento Bee. The piece is about a local actor and in the article they repeatedly assert that Casket WILL be airing on Superbowl Sunday. They even go so far as to say when “Casket” will air. Here’s some of the piece:
“Rocklin High School grad and actor Nick Armstrong has a lot riding on Sunday’s Super Bowl.
The Sacramento native will appear in a Doritos commercial that’s scheduled to air sometime before the halftime show. It’s one of three Doritos commercials competing in the chip company’s “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, and the most popular will win $1 million.
Four thousand commercials were submitted to Doritos, and three of them – including “Casket,” which features Armstrong – will be broadcast Sunday. USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter – a survey of television ads conducted as a live poll during the telecast – will determine the most popular.
Besides the $1 million for first place, Doritos will pay the second-place finisher $600,000 and the third-place finisher $400,000.”
Notice what was missing from that article? The “ifs,” and “maybes.” The paper wrote about “Casket” like it was a done deal. So does the Sacramento Bee know something we don’t? Ehhh, maybe not. This article does have one red flag in it; the author seems to imply that the 3 Doritos commercials that air will receive a cash prize even if they don’t make the Top 3 on the USA Today ad meter. It seems like they got their facts mixed up. So maybe they got the rest of the facts mixed up too? It’s a tough call, the author really makes it sounds like he’s privy to some inside information.
Well it’s finally D (for Doritos) day. Last night, at midnight central time, Doritos revealed the Top 6 finalists for their 2010 installment of the Crash the Superbowl commercial contest. The prize for making it to this round is $25,000 and a trip to the big game for each filmmaker.
Voting is now open and the public will decide which three of these submissions make it to the Superbowl. The finalists are:
“Underdog” AKA “Animal Cruelty” by jwsvoboda. Video #5584.
“The Smackout” by bhayword. Video #5511
“Casket” AKA “The Casket” by ms. Video #4374
“Snack Attack Samurai” by CBer. Video #1786
“House Rules” by Dejesus_77. Video #3713
“Kids These Days” by Blackmariastudios. Video #5427
I had figured that when the finalists were announced I would post the results and share my impressions but….I have no idea what to say here. There are two spots that I prefer but the rest are just…baffling. I know that I recommended that Doritos consider some entries for the top 6 that were rough around the edges but I never thought they’d choose entries that had actual technical flaws.
I am also feeling pretty burned about “The Casket” making the finals. As I’ve mentioned, my entry for the Crash the Superbowl contest, “Rest in Chips” was also about a guy who faked his death and in accordance with his fake last wish was buried in a casket full of Doritos that gets knocked over. As I explained in yesterday’s post and this post from November 19th, I suspect that I might be the victim of plagiarism. If you watch both entries and ignore the superficial aesthetic elements (camera quality, location, actors, costumes) and compare the concept and story elements (fake funeral, a final wish, a casket of doritos, knocked over casket etc) it’s hard to deny that both videos MAY have both based on my original concept (which anyone could have seen in a storyboard I posted to youtube in October.) But even if I wasn’t plagiarized, my video was posted first. I never expected to make it to the finals but a major part of each entry’s score was “Originality.” And I believe that I read that if two similar ideas were posted, the originality score of the video that was uploaded second would take a hit. I even e-mailed Doritos and told them about my plagiarism concerns and so I can’t believe that “The Casket” still made it. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that they almost are hoping for controversy.
Since I’m sort of at a loss for words right now, how about I turn the discussion over to you? What do you guys think of the finalists? Let us know in the comment section…..
UPDATE: SWEET JUMPING JESUS!!! It turns out that TWO of the entries in the top 6 were created by the same people! They are posted under different names but both “Kids these Days” and “Underdog” are products of a company called 5 Point Productions. That blows my mind!! People are going to flip the F#$% out when they hear about this. I think “Underdog” is great but the other entry is just ok. Doritos couldn’t spread the wealth around a little? In no way do I blame the 5 Point Productions people for this. Good for them for kicking so much ass. They couldn’t find ONE more decent spot among the 4067 that were posted!?
UPDATE: We blew it! Looks like Beardy got taken by some bad “insider” info. Two of our three “finalist” scoops turned out to be wrong! We are really sorry about that folks. We have removed the incorrect info from this site.
We were correct about one finalist though. “The Casket” was the only of the 6 finalist videos to leak before the official announcement at 12AM Central time today. So the portions of this post that pertain to “The Casket” will remain up.
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Tonight at 11PM Eastern time, voting begins in the 2010 installment of Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl video contest. From the looks of the CTSB website, the 6 finalists won’t be revealed until voting begins. So you’ll have to wait until then to see which entries made the cut. Or you could just continue reading and see three of those six videos right now.
Like I said, the Crash the Superbowl finalists won’t officially be announced until later tonight. But I can say with 95% certainty that these three ads have made the top six. WARNING: Two of these three videos are on this list because they are educated guesses based on very, very strong information. If you actually made any of these videos and you have not heard from Doritos, that means you didn’t make the finals! In that unlikely scenario, I apologize for getting your hopes up. Again, these 3 are 95% for sure.
INCORRECT VIDEO #1 REMOVED
INCORRECT VIDEO #2 REMOVED
“The Casket” by ms. Video #3006
“The Casket” is the only entry I am certain made the final cut because it was mentioned in an article about superbowl commercial sales on usatoday.com today. This….is not good. As some of you frequent readers may know, I was worried “The Casket” might get to the finals because I suspect that the makers of that entry may have plagiarized my own work. Here is MY casket-full-of-doritos entry, video #1983, “Rest in Chips.”
This is my video and NOT a finalist:
Both videos feature a dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos, a funeral for that guy that turns out to be fake, a big, framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket, shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips and a climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over. So many of the same key elements appear in both spots that it’s hard to chalk the whole thing up to coincidence.
A month before I shot “Rest in Chips,” I created a (crude) animated storyboard so that I could plan out the timing of the shoot. I uploaded the storyboard to youtube the first week of October so that my actors and crew could get a better idea of what I had in mind. I named it something like “Doritos storyboard.” That means any potential Doritos contestants could have seen it while searching youtube to see last year’s winners. In fact, it would have been one of the top results since it was a recent upload. After maybe a week I realized this and pulled the video. Then I re-uploaded it with a generic name so it would not appear in Doritos-related searches. Here it is. If you watch it on youtube you’ll see that its upload date is October 12th. Play my youtube storyboard and “The Casket” at the same time and they almost seem to line up shot for shot. And for the record, I did some googling and “The Casket” was shot on November 1st. By November 1st I already had rough cuts of my entry posted to my youtube page.
I really never expected to make it to the finals and I’m not upset because I didn’t win. But I am upset that someone who may have plagiarized my work is going to be rewarded for their actions. Because “The Casket” was so slickly produced, I knew it would be a contender for the final six. So several weeks ago I e-mailed Doritos, sent them my links and told them about my suspicions. They told me they would send the information to their legal team. But I never heard from anyone from Doritos again.
Originally, I posted (at length) about my plagiarism worries on November 19th. Since then, my suspicions have only increased. The usatoday.com article mentions the name of the producer of “The Casket” and explains that he works at the church that appears in that video. They even mention the church by name. Based on this new info, I dug through my site logs and it seems very, very likely that the producer of “The Casket” found my post about his entry last week and read it over and over.
So think about that for a second. Imagine you just found out that you made the final 6 in the CTSB contest. Then imagine that you google “Doritos casket” (according to my weblogs, that’s how the person found my post) and see that the number one search result for that phrase was a blog post by another filmmaker suggesting that your entry might have been a rip-off of his idea. What would you do? I know what I’d do. If I didn’t steal the idea, I’d immediately e-mail the blogger or leave a comment and explain my side of the story. But no message ever came.
And now that I know that the producer of “The Casket” works at the church featured in their entry, I think I have a pretty good idea what happened. The producer or the director of the entry went to youtube after the Crash the Superbowl contest was announced and searched for “doritos” so they could see what the 2009 finalist videos looked like. “The Casket” was shot with a very expensive camera called a “RED Camera.” Any filmmaker who watches last year’s finalists would recognize that all but one of them were shot with RED cameras. So the producers of “The Casket” clearly did their homework. And I suspect that while they were doing their homework, they saw my storyboard. The idea in the storyboard seems kind of outrageous and un-film-able….unless you happen to have free and total access to an amazingly beautiful church. My theory is that they saw my storyboard and figured no one would be crazy enough to get a casket and dig a giant hole in the ground. I think they assumed the idea would never be shot so they took it and adapted the idea to fit the location they had at their disposal.
For the record, I have no concrete proof of any unethical behavior and if my theories are proven to be incorrect I will wipe all mention of them from this site and apologize to everyone involved. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong I think. I have a reputation of my own to think about and I’d never share these ideas in public if my gut didn’t tell me I was on to something.
I really have no idea what I’m going to do about all this but to quote The Dude; “This aggression will not stand, man.” If anybody has any suggestions about how I should proceed I’d love to hear ‘em.
Video contests can get pretty ugly. If you're having a problem with a contest let us know! Maybe we can kick a little ass on your behalf. E-mail us at Videocontestnews@gmail.com.
