A few weeks back I blogged about the Home Run Inn Halloween Video Challenge. I love the concept (make a horror film featuring a Home Run Inn Pizza) but hated the execution (the winner of the $2,500 grand prize will be determined by web votes.) This week, Home Run Inn announced the winner of the contest. So…here’s the type of winning video you get when you let “the public” decide the results. The actual video was annoying to embed so click on the image to view.

First Place winner. Prize: $2,500

That is easily one of the worst videos I have ever seen win a contest. So how did this one win?  That’s easy to explain actually….the guy who made it apparently just stayed up every night voting for himself over and over again.  And what’s amazing is that technically, this wasn’t even cheating!  Home Run Inn made it very, very easy for contestants to stuff their own ballot boxes.  To vote, users had to register an e-mail address and then they could cast up to 15 VOTES A DAY for the video of their choice.  And the rules say absolutely nothing about not creating fake accounts.  So technically, the winner of this contest actually played by the rules…the stupid, crappy rules.  In the end, the winning video received more than 40,000 votes. Could 2,500 bucks really be worth all that work???

I wasn’t following the voting on this contest but the other contestants were. The comment box that went with the winning video is pretty ugly. People are not happy with the way things went down at all. Some contestants did keep track of the voting and the winner, “Foreseen Voices” would go up by thousands of votes in the middle of the night. And then, whenever someone would post a critical comment, a dozen, clearly fake comments (consisting of mostly random words) would appear so that the negative comment would be pushed off the page. Here are some of the more interesting comments that they tried to bury:

lyricopera2 says:

This is a lousy video in every way. Obvious duplicate accounts, and just a sad overall video. Nothing about this video is original, funny, slick, creative, or good in almost anyway. It is sad that this video is going to represent the entire contest. How about a contest based on creativity and execution rather than I’ll make 5 million accounts and carpal tunnel myself voting for it in my mom’s basement.

dpmotu3 says:

How come every time somone leaves a negative comment anther person obviuosly supporting the video comes on and leaves a stupid one line comment just enough times to get it off the front page??

mmsedm says:

People have viewed this video almost 15,000 times?!?
It has more votes in this short time span than it did in the longer Round 1 voting. What a joke this contest is! (If you can call it a contest.)

libnotice1 says:

why are people leaving bad comments? Maybe it is because no one understand how this video can get votes like crazy in the middle of the night. Maybe it is also because no one likes entering a contest you can’t win because no one can keep up with a video that is somehow getting 6000 votes a day.

Kirk LaSalle says:

This video had over 8000 votes in the fist 24 hours.. LOL when the votes get audited…(and they DO get audited)

LOL he’ll be in for surprise! LOL

“Kirk Lasalle” was wrong. There was no audit because the rules technically allowed all the activities that everyone was complaining about.  And these guys weren’t the only repeat voters by the way. The vote counts of many of the top 10 finalist videos are ludicrously high and there were plenty of accusations thrown at other filmmakers. So the whole thing was one big ClusterF#$&.

If you look at the contest website it’s immediately clear that Home Run Inn realizes they screwed up. They actually post a sort of apology NEXT TO the picture of the contest winner. It really comes off as a sort of diss against the guy. It’s like saying “ok, we screwed up and here’s the guy that wrecked the contest for everyone else by staying up all night voting for his own video over and over.”  Here’s the text of the announcement:

Thank you to everyone who participated and voted in this year’s Video Challenge. We appreciate everyone’s comments regarding how the contest should be judged in the future years. This is only our second year, so we take all comments/concerns into consideration. We are already talking about ways to make this contest better for next year and would like you to know that your feedback has definitely helped us! Something we are considering is adding in judge’s picks to the finalist round so that all videos, even those entered late in the contest, have a fair chance.

This was a really fun idea for a video contest and if judges had been in charge of picking the winner I would have entered in a second. So hopefully a new, improved version of the contest will be back next year.