Did you watch the Indy 500 on Sunday? Nope, me neither. But I had a good excuse, I was out shooting an entry for the Skinit.com contest. But if you did happen to watch the race on Sunday then maybe you caught the reveal of the winners of Godaddy.com’s first commercial contest. If you didn’t catch the reveal well, I guess it’s a good thing you have the internet. Here they are:

Godaddy has the winning videos posted to their “video.me” site and videos there are stupid hard to embed. So to watch the winning ads, you’ll have to click here: http://videos.godaddy.com/Super-Bowl-Video-Contest

Of the 10 finalists that were announced a few weeks ago, “Go Momma” and the “Get Online Rap” were two of my favorites so I’m glad to see them win. And I’m guessing that marketing nerds across the web were amazed and impressed that godaddy’s top choice was so different that the type of ads they usually put out. To quote Godaddy’s own press release, Go Momma was uncharacteristically “Cleavage-Free.” The ad  has aired a few times on TV so keep your eyes open and you might just catch it.  I bet Godaddy is going to wind up airing it a lot.  As well they should.  I think Go Mamma is easily the best GoDaddy commercial ever because instead of being a confusing, PG-rated strip show, it actually explained what Godaddy.com does!

But the big news isn’t really WHO won this contest…it’s HOW MUCH was won. Here’s a quote from that Godaddy press release I mentioned:

“Five Honorable Mention winners will receive $15,000, raising the prize winnings to $250,000, which makes Go Daddy’s “Create Your Own Commercial” contest the highest guaranteed payout of any commercial contest in advertising history.”

Wow. So apparently, Godaddy was so impressed with their finalists that at the last minute they decided to give 5 other videos “Honorable Mentions” awards of $15,000 each. Wait a second…if there were 3 big winners and 5 honorable mentions, that means 2 finalists didn’t get $15K. Man, sucks to be them! (You can see all the Honorable Mention Winners here.)

And there’s some other news to report; the mystery of why this was called Godaddy.com’s Super Bowl video contest has been solved!  Turns out the contest was announced on Super Bowl Sunday and it was never Godaddy’s intention to actually air the winning ads during the big game.  I follow video contests as closely as pretty much anyone around and I didn’t hear about the godaddy contest until a few days after the superbowl.  So the name of the contest never made much sense.  Why start a “Superbowl” video contest right after the game just ended?  But now that the whole thing is over it’s pretty clear that Godaddy was attempting to out Doritos, Doritos by creating their own, bigger version of the Crash the Superbowl contest.  Maybe next year Godaddy will call their contest “Crash the Indy 500.”  Or maybe not…that pun is only funny until a racer dies in a flaming wreck.

So is Godaddy gearing up to try and overtake Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest as THE must-enter video contest of the year?  You know, I certainly hope so.  I sort of think the Crash the Superbowl contest has run its course.  Yeah it gets bigger every year but a video contest that gets 4,000 entries is just out of control.  Godaddy only got about 500 entries but the average quality of those videos BLEW AWAY the average quality of the 2009 Crash the Superbowl entries.  Doritos ads have been done to death and it’d be great to see another company step up and make a grab for the title of the Ultimate User-Generated video contest.  In fact, I’d like to see Godaddy run this contest again this fall and air the winners during the actual Superbowl.  If Doritos does the Crash the Superbowl contest again, it’d make for a great story.  Not only would the media be interested in who won each contest, they’d cover the unofficial contest which would be to see which company would air a better User-Generated ad.

Note: This is an updated and expanded version of our first taxslayer post from May 5^th.

Despite giving at least one filmmaker a written and signed guarantee that the 2010 Taxslayer.com video contest would not be canceled due to a lack of entries, Taxslayer shocked the poor suckers who wasted their time creating submissions for them this year when they announced that the contest was indeed being canceled…due to lack of entries.  (From my count, they got at least 18 submissions which seems like plenty, doesn’t it?) The cancellation announcement came on May 5th; almost three weeks after the submission deadline had passed.  Oh…and the filmmaker they gave that written and signed guarantee to was me.  On their word that the contest would go on no matter how many entries were recived, I went out and spent approximately 50 hours and $400 writing, shooting and editing two entries for this year’s taxslayer contest.  In total, I created 90 seconds of video content because the “taxslayer team” assured me that my efforts could be worth as much as $20,000 in prize money.  I have tried repeatedly to talk to someone from taxslayer about why they lied to me and let me waste so much time and money on a contest that they knew was probably going to wind up being canceled.  But so far, I’ve been met with nothing but mind-blowing levels of rudeness.

For three years, the annual Taxslayer.com commercial contest has been one of the highest profile and best known video contests on the web. In 2008, this video was selected as the winner of the contest. The filmmaker received $25,000 and the ad went on to air on national TV during the 2009 Tax season. In 2009, this video won the second annual competition and again, the filmmaker behind it was paid $25,000. Except this time (much to the surprise of many contestants) Taxslayer announced they were going to re-shoot the ad before airing it. Here’s the result.  This re-shoot concept was never mentioned in the rules and many contests who created tv-quality entries were furious that taxslayer let them waste so much of their time and money when apparently, all they were after were ideas they could have a production company re-shoot.

The Taxslayer; he will smite you with his mighty lies

In January, Taxslayer brought the contest back for 2010 but it came with some odd changes. For one, the prize for first place was reduced to $15,000 and a second place prize of $5,000 was added. But what was really bizarre were the strict submission guidelines. Filmmakers were required to submit both a 15 second and a 30 second version of their ads.  So taxslayer was paying less money for more work.  On top of the changes, Taxslayer would not confirm whether they wanted ads that could air on TV as-is or if filmmakers should just shoot something simple that taxslayer could remake later.

The complicated and unclear rules scared most filmmakers away but I entered and lost this contest in 2009 (my first loss ever!) and I had spent a whole year thinking of ideas I could shoot if it was was brought back. The taxslayer rules required that filmmakers upload their videos to youtube and then tag them “taxslayer2010.”  So two weeks before the hard-to-forget submission deadline of April 15th, I checked youtube.  The submission period had been open for 2 1/2 months but I found just ONE, SINGLE ENTRY!

Normally, seeing just one entry would make this a must-enter contest.  But I remembered seeing something in the rules that said that taxslayer could cancel the contest if they didn’t get enough submissions. Entering a contest that is probably going to be canceled would be a pretty stupid waste of time. So on March 30th I sent an e-mail to Taxslayer.com. Here’s a piece of it:

I run a video contest blog called “The Video Contest news” and we’ve done a few posts about this year’s taxslayer contest. I, and many of my readers would like to enter the contest but I have a feeling that it is going to be canceled this year due to lack of entries. Is there a chance the contest will be canceled? If the contest is on for sure, and if I announced that guarantee on my blog, you for sure would get lots of new entries from our readers.

An hour later, I got this response. (The all-caps bit included)

The contest will NOT be cancelled. We regularly receive the bulk of our entries in early April.

Thanks!

A few seconds later, I got a second response from Taxslayer. This time it came directly from the head of the contest, Daniel Eubanks. Mr. Eubanks is the Assistant Director of the “Growth Division” at Taxslayer’s parent company, Rhodes Financial Services in Augusta, Georgia. I know all that because his electronic business card was attached to the e-mail. Here’s what he said:

Dan,

I hope I didn’t sound rude in my previous email, I just wanted to make sure you knew we definitely won’t cancel the contest. Let me know if I can help with anything else.

Thanks!

Daniel Eubanks
Assistant Director of Growth
TaxSlayer.com

After getting such a positive response I wrote Mr. Eubanks back and said I wanted to do a post on VCN about the contest and try and clarify some of the confusing parts of the rules.  Here’s a piece of my e-mail:

The filmmakers who read my website kind of make up the unofficial core of the video contest community.  These are the people who regularly enter video contests and usually turn in some of the highest quality entries.  After I posted about this year’s taxslayer contest I heard from a number of people who were confused by the new rules.  I’ve read the rules from top to bottom and I’m still not 100% sure what is required.  Would you be willing to answer a few questions and clarify a few things?  If I posted these clarifications on my site, I think you would definitely see a jump in high-quality entries.  The reason I asked if the contest was going to be cancelled is because from talking to other filmmakers, I get the feeling that many are going to skip this contest and instead focus on one of the other big contests that are running right now.

I then asked six questions for the article.  To my surprise, Mr. Eubanks never responded.  The rules implied that no questions about the contest could be answered so I took Mr. Eubanks’ silence to mean that he had already said too much and that I shouldn’t do the post.

Still, I now had personal guarantee from the head of the contest so I immediately started planning an entry. How could I not?  Not only did I have inside information that the contest would not be canceled no matter how many entries were received, (and it looked like they weren’t going to get many) I had a written and electronically signed agreement to that fact from the head of the contest!  That’s a legally binding contract right there, my friend!  Mr. Eubanks knew that his guarantee would result in me and possibly my readers (I e-mailed a few of them about the guarantee and I know of 2 for sure that did entries) creating entries for the contest so it would be ethically and legally irresponsible as well as just plan dumb to cancel the contest after entering into such an agreement….right?

I was so excited about my inside information that after I finished my first entry (consisting of a 30 second and 15 second version, remember) I started thinking that maybe I had enough time to do a second entry. Like a sign from above, just as I was about to upload my first submission, I got another e-mail from Daniel Eubanks at Taxslayer.com on April 6th. Here it is.  Presumably, everyone who entered the contest last year got this same message.

We are quickly approaching the April 15th deadline for the 2010 TaxSlayer.com video contest. We noticed that you submitted an entry last year but have not done so yet this year. We value all of our submissions and hope to receive one from you this year. If you have any questions at all about the contest please let us know. If you are already working on an entry and plan to submit it soon please reply to this email and let us know so that we can be on the lookout for your submission. Thanks for your help and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

-The TaxSlayer Team

They were begging for entries!  Looking back, that e-mail really infuriates me since Taxslayer probably knew that the contest was going to be canceled when they sent out their last minute call for entries.  I’m guessing the head of the contest decided he should at least make it look like he tried to get more people to submit.  But how many people can really pull together a TV-quality production in just 9 days??  I can’t help but suspect that they knew that anyone entering the contest at that point would just be wasting their time and money.

Taxslayer spends a fortune sponsoring race cars but I guess paying out video contest winnings would break the bank

Of course, I wasn’t thinking so negatively at the time.  But I was worried I might knock myself out shooting another submission only to find out that the deadline was being extended. So I e-mailed Mr. Eubanks again and he said “At this time it doesn’t look like the contest will be extended.”

I just about lost my mind. This was an unbelievable opportunity and I was probably the only filmmaker who knew about it.  I wrote a second script and put up a call for actors on craisglist that very day. By April 15th, I had created two complete entries for the taxslayer contest consisting of 4 videos total. The day after the deadline I checked youtube and found 18 entries for the 2010 contest and posted them all here on VCN. My odds of winning at least $5,000 was 1 in 4.5. As you can guess, my hopes were high.

So I was completely flabbergasted/crushed/befuddled/pissed when on may 5th, Taxslayer.com sent out an e-mail to everyone who submitted videos for this year’s commercial contest and announced that the 2010 competition was being CANCELED due to lack of submissions. Again, this announcement came almost 3 weeks after the April 15th cut off for submissions and just about 2 weeks before they should have announced the winners.

I have been following and entering online video contests since 2007 and I have NEVER seen this kind of thing happen before. I have seen one or two small contests disappear before any entries were recived but I think canceling a video contest after the deadline might be totally unprecedented. It’s a huge shock and major disappointment that one of the most established and best known contests would do this to all the people who spent precious time, money and resources making videos for them. Among those 18 entries I found on youtube, I saw several that I thought would make great winners. Some were professionally produced and ready for TV.  I guess taxslayer didn’t feel the same way though. Here’s the e-mail they sent out:

Dear Contest Participant,

First we would like to thank you for your entry into the 2010 TaxSlayer.com Commercial Contest. We received some great submissions and are very thankful for your efforts. Regrettably we did not receive the required number of entries for the contest. Pursuant to section four of the Official Contest Rules, “If a minimum (number of)… entries are not received by the end of the contest period…the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.” With this in mind, the contest will be voided effective immediately. Once again we would like to thank you for your participation. Please know that as a result of this, you are released of all of your duties and obligations pursuant to the official rules.

Sincerely,

The TaxSlayer Team

What really bothers me about this message is that the “Taxslayer Team” implies that they had no choice but to cancel the contest if a minimum number of entries were not received. This however, is not true. This is the statement from the above e-mail:

“Pursuant to section four of the Official Contest Rules, “If a minimum (number of)… entries are not received by the end of the contest period…the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.” With this in mind, the contest will be voided effective immediately.”

And this is what “section four of the official contest rules” actually say:

“If a minimum twenty five (25) (submitted by separate individuals) entries are not received by the end of the contest period, at the sole discretion of the sponsor, the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.”

As you can see, those ellipses replaced some crucial details. Taxslayer.com was not legally required to cancel their contest if they didn’t get more than 25 entries. The contest could be voided AT THE DISCRETION OF THE SPONSOR. Translation; we don’t have to cancel it if we don’t want to.  Yet taxslayer intentionally omitted that fact from their letter to contestants and made it sound like the rules forced them to void the contest.  That was a really scummy move.

I’m guessing that Taxslayer has gotten a lot of angry e-mails in the last few days. Sadly, they don’t even respect contestants enough to answer these messages individually. I contacted Taxslayer and asked a number of questions. They ignored my questions and e-mailed me the same form-letter response they apparently sent to everyone. Here it is:

Dear —,

First let me apologize on a personal note for the cancellation of the contest. I apologize if there was any confusion as to whether or not the contest would be canceled. We understand that everyone who participated committed valuable time and resources and for that we are grateful. Please note that this is our third video contest and we have never had to cancel before. In years past we have received well over the required number of submissions. Please know that we never anticipated coming up short this year. In many cases we have worked with more contestants than just the winner. That being said the number of submissions wasn’t enough to work with this year. All of the videos will remain on our radar as we plan our marketing for next tax season. If there is a video or idea that we feel would work well with our plans we will be sure to contact that contestant on an individual basis and they will in turn be compensated accordingly. Please be assured that your submissions will not be disregarded just because the contest has been cancelled.

Sincerely,

Daniel Eubanks

Wait a second Mr. Eubanks…you “never anticipated coming up short this year?”  Well that’s just a lie.  You and I discussed that very possibility via e-mail! And you “apologize if there was any confusion as to whether or not the contest would be canceled????  I’m not confused…I was lied to!  If I was confused it’s only because you confused me.

I’m sure there was a lot of pressure on Mr. Eubanks as head of the contest to get as many entries submitted as possible.  But did Taxslayer really want him to go so far as to trick people into entering?  After I got the canned complaint response, I wrote Mr. Eubanks again and said that his form letter did not answer any of my questions.  I did hear back from him and he seemed amazed that I still cared about this dumb, ole’ contest.  He gave me his number and said if I could call him if I wanted.  I said I would, but first, I thought he should have this:

Click to embiggen

That’s an invoice for my time and expenses for the projects that Mr. Eubanks greenlit.  The letter with the invoice explains why he’s legally obligated to compensate me for the work I did.  The guy works for a “financial services” company though so I’m sure he knows full well that he screwed up and got me to enter the taxslayer contest under false pretenses. Just for the record, that invoice accurately reflects that amount of time I spent on my taxslayer videos and the amounts are based on my rates for production work.  For two 30 second ads and two 15 second ads I expect to be paid $4,447.00.  Trust me, that is a hell of a bargain. If I wanted to be unreasonable about this I’d also bill them for the $1,200 in new production gear I bought to shoot my entries.

Anyways, anyone care to guess how Mr. Eubanks reacted to the invoice?  If you guessed “like a total jerk” you guessed correctly.  My e-mails to Mr. Eubanks have all been ignored.  I’ve called him several times and he never picked up.  I left several messages and he never called back.  Today, I finally called him from an anonymous number and he picked up.  I told him who I was and guess what he did…

He hung up on me.

I wasn’t too surprised though.  Earlier that day I called Rhodes Financial Services and talked to the operator.  I asked for the name of the director of the “Growth division” (that would be Mr. Eubank’s boss)  Can you guess what the operator did?

She hung up on me too!

I called back and she sounded pissed.  I got the guy’s name though so if this Daniel Eubanks guy is not enough of a professional to deal with the mess he made, I’ll try his boss.  And if anyone reading this entered the taxslayer contest this year and would like Mr. Eubanks’ boss’ contact info, just let me know.

I started this blog nine months because simply put, I love video contests.  They’re fun, they’re great ways to get experience and best of all, you can make a lot of money with them.  But in the last 9 months I’ve watched filmmakers get screwed every which way you could think of in these contests.  9 times out of 10 there’s nothing you can do about it.  But this time, the person who got screwed is me and I just happen to have the law on my side in this matter.  Mr. Eubanks knew that if he lied to me I would go out and create entries for the taxslayer contest and he knew that if he told me the truth (that the contest could have been canceled) he knew I would NOT have created any entries.  I understand that the rules said that the contest MAY be canceled if fewer than 25 entries were submitted and the other people who entered this contest accepted the risk that the contest could be canceled under certain conditions.  But n my case, Mr. Eubanks’ personal, written guarantee to me as a representative of taxslayer.com supersedes the generic terms of the contest rules.  Why did the guy lie to me to get me to enter the contest?  I don’t know…but he did.  And now he and his company need to step up and fulfill their obligations.  In the real world, you don’t just get to waste people’s time and money and then shrug your shoulders and walk away. You can’t just lie to people and then hang up on them when they call looking for answers.  That’s not how you treat your customers.  Oh yeah…that’s what really sucks about this.  I’m a paying customer of taxslayer.com!  I used them to file my taxes this year because I wanted to support a company that supported video contests!  From here on out though, I’m a Turbo-Tax man.

UPDATE:  Oh snap.  We seem to have gotten the attention of someone at taxslayer.com.  It looks like someone at taxslayer’s parent company, Rhodes Financial Services tried to leave this angry comment in response to this post:

Dude…get over it. You are right, as you proved, it is nearly impossible to create a quality commercial in 9 days. Your entry was awful. You would have lost anyways. Grow up, you should be ashamed of yourself. On another note I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy and his company slap a slander suit on you so fast your head spins.

That comment was made by someone using a fake name and a fake e-mail address.  But I checked my web stats and it’s pretty clear that this comment was made by someone at the Rhodes Financial offices in Augusta, GA.  Presumably it was the head of the contest, Daniel Eubanks since he knows I run this site and that I have been blogging about the cancellation of the contest.  For a full explanation of how I could tell where the above comment came from, click here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/05/12/did-this-angry-comment-come-from-the-head-of-the-taxslayer-contest/

I didn’t realize that Godaddy was going to let the public know who made the finals of their ginormous commercial contest but I checked the website today and they had 10 “Finalists” listed.  They also announced that the winner and a few of the runners-up will make their debut during the Indy 500 on May 30th.  Man, godaddy is smart.  That seems like the perfect event for this kind of unveiling.  Plus that’s a long friggin’ race so they’ll probably air a lot of the finalists.

Every one of the videos that made the top 10 are pretty solid.  And there’s a nice variety to the finalists.  Some are “sexy” and some are goofy but they’re all funny.  There’s only one kind of amateurish video (the one about the super powers godaddy can give you and it made me chuckle) but there rest of the videos are 100% pro all the way.  They are as slick as can be.  Hey, $175,000 is at stake so it’s only fitting that the commercials look professional.  But all the folks who shot entries in their basements with their flip cameras will probably be mad that they only picked slick productions.

Like I said, I enjoyed all the finalists videos.  They’re all funny but none of them really hit it out of the park.  So I was impressed but not blown away.  But people really outdid themselves and it looks like some people spent a lot of cash on their productions.  You can see all 10 finalists at http://videos.godaddy.com/super-bowl-video-contest but here are my 2 favorites:

The “Get online rap” is pretty good too but I can’t find it on youtube.  The public voting period is also over now and you can see which videos won the “community” prizes for having the highest scores.  Remember, those prizes are stuff like laptops and cameras.  Here’s the video that wound up being the hightest rated:

Christ, what an asshole.  As you can guess, the annoying jerk in that video is a youtube celebrity who got his legion of tween followers to vote for him.  I’m sure the folks at Godaddy are quite relived that they didn’t let “the public” pick their $100,000 winner.

5/9/2010 UPDATE:  An astute commenter pointed out that the only non-slick finalist I mentioned has already been named the winner of the OTHER godaddy commercial contest.  If you like contests enough to actually read this website, you probably already know that Godaddy ran two video contests concurrently.  There was the big $175,000 contest and then there was an alternative contest run on the contest site zooppa.  The prize in that one was only $3,000.  For some reason, people in other countries and certain states (NY and FL I think) weren’t legally eligible to enter the big contest.  So that everyone could have a chance to enter, the second contest was created.  Some sneaky filmmakers submitted their commercials to both.  That seems like bad form to me but I guess it worked for the guy who made the “superpowers” ad.  It’s as simple as can be but it’s well written and well perfromed.  Check it out:

Winner, Godaddy’s ZOOPPA contest.  Prize: $3,000

The deadline to enter Godaddy’s commercial contest was last Friday and it looks like they received in the neighborhood of 530 entries! I say “in the neighborhood” because I counted all the entries myself and after scrolling for that I long my counting probably suffered some. 530 entries is a major accomplishment but what’s especially noteworthy is the QUALITY of those 530 entries. Sure, there are a ton of videos in that bunch that make you wonder “what were those people thinking?” but a significant percentage of entries were serious attempts to make a good, TV-quality commercial. I was amazed to see that most entries were shot in wide screen HD too. Yes, $100,000 is a lot of motivation but in Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest, millions were at stake. But the average quality of the Godaddy entries blows away the quality of the average Crash the Superbowl entry.

So, I think this really marks the start of a new era in video contests. Things have changed a lot in just the 7 months that have passed since the deadline for the last Doritos contest. More people are now able to make better quality videos with a new wave of cheap, easy to use cameras. The playing field has become very level, very fast. Even my own entry turned out better-looking than my past projects because I just bought a new SLR that also shoots HD video. I think it turned out well, so permit me to show it off. Watch in 1080p mode for the full effect:

If you watched a lot of the other Godaddy entries, you probably noticed that mine is kind of different from the typical submission. I was surprised that so many filmmakers went with the “hot godaddy girl does (blank) in a sexy way” angle.  There were some really good “sexy” entries but I figured that if Godaddy was going through all this trouble to get fresh material, maybe they are looking for something totally different. So I thought I’d feature a different kind of a godaddy girl in my ad; a girl who actually builds a website using godaddy.com.

I had a few other strategies for this contest. My plan was to jam as much interesting stuff into 30 seconds as possible to create a Rube Goldberg-esque story. Hopefully, the spot moves so quickly and is full of so many small gags that online viewers will automatically hit “replay” as soon as it ends and if it were on TV, viewers would pay attention when it popped up on their screens. And any ad that viewers want to watch more than once succeeds on at least one level.

But my big theory about my video was this: Everybody…hates…hipsters. Even hipsters hate hipsters! (one symptom of hipsterism is denial mixed with disdain for their own kind) Despite all the anti-hipster sentiments floating around the zeitgeist, I’ve never seen a commercial that captures those feelings.

Actually, this whole ad was loosely inspired by the blog Look at this Fucking Hipster. It’s a blog that posts nothing but shots of hipsters douching it up. That blog, like so may other popular blogs (Icanhascheezeburger, Cake Wrecks, post secret, etc) wound up getting a “blog-to-book-deal.” In fact, the trend has become so hot that there’s even an awesome parody blog out there called “Look at this fucking idea for a blog to book deal.” (http://fuckingbookdeal.com) If you have some time to kill and enjoy internet meta humor, check it out.

So what about you? Did you get your godaddy entry done in time? If you want to use VCN to hustle for some votes, just a post a link to your video in the comment section and I’ll move the link into the body of this post. (make sure you use the link godaddy provides when you click the “share this video” button under your entry.) I’ll get the ball rolling; if you like my video and dislike hipsters, why not do me a favor and rate my entry 5 stars?:

http://videos.godaddy.com/Super-Bowl-Video-Contest.aspx?vid=699

UPDATES:

1. Here’s a very, very well made ad by VCN reader Shane F. that’s certainly worth a 5 star vote:  http://bit.ly/bPlKhd

2. Reader Ilya just sent me this link to her very slick godaddy spot.  I really like how it uses sexy girls in a new, funny way:   http://bit.ly/bQcgx2

3.  And here’s a funny one from “Brotha Godaddy:”  http://bit.ly/bQRqTy

4.  Here’s a good serious entry from VCN regular, David R:  http://bit.ly/9k6NG4

MAY 5, 2010 UPDATE:  This morning, Taxslayer sent out e-mails to everyone who submitted videos for this year’s competition and announced that the contest was being CANCELED due to lack of submissions.  As you will see below, I found 18 video submissions for this year’s contest and some of them are very good.  I have been following and entering online video contests since 2007 and I have NEVER seen this kind of thing happen before.  It’s a total shock and major disappointment that one of the most established and best known contests would do this to all the people who spent precious time, money and resources making videos for them.

I can tell from my web-logs that a number of people have found this post after searching for reasons behind today’s the cancellation.  We will be doing a thorough post about this later this week but for now, if you entered the 2010 Taxslayer video contest please let us know at Videocontestnews@gmail.com.

2nd Update: We just put up a new post about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest.  You can find it here:  http://videocontestnews.com/2010/05/05/taxslayer-com-cancels-video-contest-20-days-after-the-submission-deadline/

Well yesterday was April 15^th: Tax Day.  If you won a lot of money in video contests last year, right about now you’re probably wishing you had saved some of that money to pay your tax bill.  But April 15^th was also the deadline for the third annual Taxslayer.com video contest.  For weeks I had been wrestling with several ideas for this one but I just couldn’t get them to work.  So eventually I  decided to just skip the contest this year.  But about 9 days ago, a fresh idea hit me and I figured I should to go for it.  I was even motivated to finally buy the HD camera I had been considering.

I photoshopped my props on Wednesday and I bought my camera on Thursday.  I spent a few hours trying to figure the thing out and then we filmed on Friday.  By Monday I had both my 30 second and 15 second versions (remember, you had to submit 2 versions for this one) edited and done.

So after all that work, I was totally burnt out by Monday.  Then…another idea hit me.  I figured I had spent so much money on my new camera that I should try and get some use out of it so I wrote, produced, shot and edited a second entry in record time…well, record time for me, anyway.

One of the rules of the taxslayer contest is that contestants must upload their entries to youtube and tag them “taxslayer2010.”  As far as I can tell, 18 pairs of videos were submitted.  And there are some pretty good ones in there.  Since taxslayer doesn’t post all the entries, I thought I’d embed the 30 second versions of all of them below.  These are in order by upload date from last to first.  Can you spot which two entries are mine?  I’ll reveal them at the bottom of the post.

So the two entries I did are “It’s Tax Time!” (The one with the people playing the board game) and “Use Taxslayerrrrr.com” (the one with the pirates and their booty.)  I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.  I did forget one of the five required “Taxslayer.com” mentions in my pirate ad and had to use some creative editing to squeeze one more in though.

If I see any more entries, I will update this post.  But I think these are all of them.  If you have any thoughts about who will win first ($15,000) and second ($5,000) this year, post them in the comments.

Do a google image search for "April" and you'll get this and a ton of porn

April is finally here and two big contests have deadlines this month. The first is the perennial Taxslayer.com commercial contest with the hard-to-forget deadline of April 15th. There are two big prizes in this contest; first place gets $15,000 and second gets $5,000. The other deadline to remember this month is April 23rd. That’s for the Godaddy commercial contest. Godaddy’s giving away more than $175,000 in that one so you might want to ad it to your calendar.

Since both the taxslayer and godaddy contests require contestants to upload their videos to youtube, it’s really easy to check out the competition. So let’s see what’s been submitted so far.

Let’s start Taxslayer. According to that contest’s rules, contestants must upload their entries to youtube and tag them “Taxslayercontest2010.” Doing a search for that tag yields just ONE, solitary result. Here it is:

Remember for this one, contestants are required to submit both a 30 second and a 15 second version of their entry. You can watch the 15 second version of the above ad here.

As we’ve mentioned before, Taxslayer lowered their prize amount and instituted some new rules this year. And it looks like those changes have scared everyone away. I had pretty much decided not to enter but if no one else is going to enter, maybe I should after all?

The Godaddy contest on the other hand has already received a whole bunch of entries. You can scroll through them all here: http://videos.godaddy.com/Super-Bowl-Video-Contest.aspx

But how about I save you a lot of time and just show you the three best entries so far. These three seem to be the only ones slick enough for TV:

EDIT:  Looks like I missed one.  Someone left a link to this entry in a comment.  It’s very slick but it’s kind of odd because it seems to be sort of a parody of the sample entry that godaddy produced:

As you can guess, a lot of crazy shit has been submitted too.  This video for instance is just plain WRONG. I think Chris Hanson needs to pay a visit to whoever came up with this idea:

If you shoot an entry for either the taxslayer or the godaddy contests and want to show off your work, e-mail us a link or just leave it in a comment below. We’ll post some more of our favorite entries later this month.

For the third year in a row, Taxslayer.com is running their annual commercial contest.  I think I’ve got a decent idea for an entry and was looking forward to entering.  But this year, the rules of the taxslayer contest are so strange and complex that I think I might have to have to skip it.  It’s just giving me a weird vibe.  They’re asking contestants to provide a lot more stuff this year even though they are offering a grand prize that is $10,000 LESS than in previous years.  In 2008 and 2009, participants were supposed to submit one, 30 to 60 second commercial and one winner was awarded $25,000.  This year, the grand prize has been reduced to $15,000 and participants must submit TWO versions of their commercial; one that’s 15 seconds long and one that’s 30 seconds long.

For the first time though, Taxslayer is also giving away $5,000 for second place.  But last year, after the contest ended and the winner was picked, Taxslayer turned two other contestant’s entries into commercials.  So those people probably got $5,000 a piece at least.  Plus, Taxslayer paid to have all three of last year’s selected videos re-shot by professionals.  So while they are giving out more official prizes, they will be spending probably at least 20 grand less on this year’s video contest.

If you entered last year, you already know that the a lot of contestants were not happy about the winner that Taxslayer’s judges picked.  Here it is:

2009 Taxslayer Winner.  Prize: $25,000

No offense to the maker of the video and friend of VCN “HappyJoel” Moss but that video had zero production values.  It was a funny idea and he gave a good performance but everyone who entered the contest assumed that the whole point was to make a real  Taxslayer commercial that would air on TV.  After all, they aired the 2008 winner on TV exactly as it was submitted.  (click here to see that one.)  The 2008 winner featured a guy in a real knight’s costume riding around on a real horse but the 2009 video featured a guy in a plastic knight’s costume and a print out of the taxslayer logo on his toy shield.

Taxslayer received tons of really great, professionally made entries.  Any number of them were good enough to put right on TV.  My own entry didn’t turn out so well so I didn’t expect to win at all.   But when they announced that the Press Conference video has won, I was still shocked.  Taxslayer explained that they loved HappyJoel’s press conference idea so much that they decided to pick him as the winner and planned to pay a production company to shoot a professional version of the ad.  (See the remake that’s now airing on tv, here)  But that explanation just caused a lot more frustration.  If taxslayer wanted to re-shoot the winning ad, why didn’t they just say so right from the start?  I personally spent A LOT of time and a little bit of money shooting my taxslayer entry last year and I did it because I thought that I was supposed to shoot something that was “tv-ready.”  That’s what a lot of people thought.

So this year, I was looking forward to the contest because I thought they would be just looking for IDEAS for good commercials they could re-shoot. When I heard that the prize had been reduced by 10 Grand, I assumed that they were for sure just going to be looking for ideas.  But then I read the 2010 rules and now I have NO IDEA what those people want from us!

Here’s Taxslayer’s video that outlines the official rules of the contest:

The video says that in addition to winning $15,000 this year’s winners “may be broadcast on national television as part of the 2011 taxslayer.com commercial campaign.”

OK, SO WHAT THE HECK DOES THAT MEAN??  Do they want slick, ready-for-TV commercials or do they just care about cool ideas since they plan to re-shoot them anyway?  Since the prize is so much smaller and since they re-shot 3 entries last year we should obviously save our money and make simple “Sample” ads, right?  But if that’s the case, why do they want one 15 second version and one 30 second version?  And why in the name of God do we have to submit copies of our entries on BETA TAPE?  They would only need a BetaSP copy of an ad if they were going to show it on TV.

It seems like Taxslayer is trying to hedge their bets.  If a contestant submits an ad that’s slick enough to air on TV, Taxslayer will save a ton of money if they pick it since they won’t have to re-shoot it.  But just in case they don’t like any of the high-production-value entries they get, they want to still have the option to re-shoot the winning ads.

And here’s another weird thing about this contest; First place gets you $15,000 and second gets you $5,000.  But Taxslayer will use both of those ads in their 2010 commercial campaign.  So the second place winner is getting a seriously raw deal!  Since both 1^st and 2^nd place videos will probably appear on TV, Taxslayer should purchase them both for the same price.

But there is no guarantee that Taxslayer will actually show any of this year’s entries (or remakes based on entries) on TV.  Nothing (that I saw) in the official rules say anything about the winning ads appearing on TV.  That is because Taxslayer doesn’t want to be contractually obligated to air any commercials.  They say the winning videos MIGHT air on TV and they only say that in the rules video.  They probably will air at least one winner but it’d be nice if they were willing to commit to that in writing.

Oh!  I almost forget the icing on the cake.  The ultimate winners of the contest will be picked by taxslayer’s judges.  But they will pick the winners from a pool of 20 finalists.  Those finalists will be determined by view counts and star ratings on youtube!  So if you even want to be considered, you better already have a decent number of subscribers and nice, deep social network.  Hey wait a second…I run a blog that gets thousands of hits a month!  Maybe I should enter.  If I appealed to VCN readers for support I should at least be able to get enough views and votes to land in the top 20.  Hmmmmm….

Like I said, I’ve been looking forward to entering this year’s Taxslayer contest.  But there are so many other HUGE contests running right now I’m not sure I should spend my time and resources on one that is so vague about what they want.  I wanted to write taxslayer and ask them to clarify some of their rules but I couldn’t find any contact info on the contest site; just an e-mail address for submissions and the rules say “this email address is for submissions only, we will not respond to questions or other communications.”  So I thought maybe I’d just ask my questions into the ether of the internet and see if anyone else had any theories about what exactly taxslayer is looking for.

Unless Taxslayer comes out and clarifies their rules, I think I’m going to pass on this one.  Or maybe I’ll got for it…I don’t know. Anybody out there plan on entering?

Unless your Internet has been down for the last week or two, you’ve probably heard about Godaddy.com’s huge, new commercial contest.  It’s one of the absolute, best video contests I have ever seen.  First off, the prizes are huge.  Third place wins you $25,000, second place is $50,000 and first place is $100,000.  Second, many big-money contests host all the entries themselves.  But for this one, participants just submit their entries via youtube.  So unlike last year’s Doritos and Butterfinger contests, no entries will disappear in the depths of the sponsor’s servers and contestants won’t have to wait for days for their videos to appear online.  The only catch is that you have to sign up for a goddady account, which is free.

I think the thing I like best about this contest though is that the top three winners will be picked by Godaddy judges and not by a public vote.  That means the quality videos actually have a chance of coming out on top.  But the folks behind this contest did something else very smart.  Visitors to the site will be able to vote for their favorite entries but those votes have no impact on which videos win the top prizes.  Instead, there are smaller (but still pretty good) prizes for entries that are the “audience favorites.”

The deadline to enter is April 23^rd so you still have a good, long while to get your submissions in.  To kick things off, the Godaddy team created a sample entry.

Godaddy sample entry:

Here’s what the godaddy team had to say about their sample entry:

“If we expect you to make a commercial for the GoDaddy.com Commercial Contest, we should be able to make one ourselves, right? This is an idea we (Go Daddy’s Social Media Team) put together to give you an example of a potential submission for the contest. Of course, we’re not eligible to win. Also, our example’s a bit longer than the 30 second limit…”

I think it’s funny though that the sample video is 16 seconds longer than the official time limit.  Just goes to show how hard it is to keep an idea under 30 seconds.  Having their “social media team” create a sample entry is just the kind of thing that gives me a good feeling about a  video contest.  It shows that the sponsor is holding the contest partly for the fun of it.  I’ll tell you, not only will I be entering this contest, I plan to throw everything I got at this one.

Important Note! If you live in New York, Florida or outside of the US, don’t bother entering because you ain’t eligible for some reason.  Check the official rules for more details about who can enter.

———————-

Beardy is camping out to buy tickets for tonight’s 12:01AM screening of Twilight so while he’s away I thought I’d step in and do a little self-promotion. I also wanted to share my Doritos hard luck story. Like pretty much anybody reading this site, I submitted an entry for this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest. And here is that very entry now!

Be honest, it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever seen right? I’m super proud of my submission but I know that the competition out there is tough. And I was totally ok with the fact that with thousands of entries coming in, 6 teams of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and Red cameras and fancy dollies would probably come along and take all the finalist spots. And like I said, I was totally cool with that. But then….I saw this:

Ahhhhh! Some team of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and a Red camera and a fancy dolly came along and filmed an idea a whole lot like mine! Man, that’s a bummer. The coincidences between that spot and mine are just crazy, aren’t they? When 4000 people each try and come up with an idea for a commercial for the same product there’s obviously going to be some overlap, but damn, there’s a lot of overlap here. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of CTSB entries that have really similar ideas. (For instance, how many Doritos-as-a-paper-football and dorito-loving-zombies spots have you watched in the last few weeks?) But of the 2200 or so Crash entries I’ve watched, I don’t think there are two of them that share more common elements than these two casket-full-of-doritos entries. I mean, it’s not just that both videos are funeral scenes. It’s that both videos include:

1. A dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos
2. A funeral for that guy that turns out to be fake
3. A big, framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket
4. Shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips
5. A climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over

That’s sort of a lot of similarities to squeeze into 30 seconds, isn’t it? I have to wonder, what the heck happened here? Is this just a case of really bad luck or is the CIA monitoring my brainwaves as part of some kind of scheme to control the masses via secret messages hidden in a superbowl commercial? There’s no chance that another team of filmmakers were somehow (gulp) inspired by my entry, is there?

My entry, Rest in Chips was uploaded on Friday, November 6th and the other video, The Casket, appeared online a few days later. I might be paranoid but I’m not crazy enough to think that the makers of the other entry saw Rest In Chips and then ran out the next day and rented a church so they could make their own version of my spot. So I was left with only one conclusion; this was just a giant coincidence…nothing more.

But then it finally hit me; I am an idiot. After I wrote my script I created and animated storyboard so I could see if I could fit my entire idea into 30 seconds. On October 6th, I uploaded that storyboard animation on to youtube. Then I sent the link to a few people and asked for ideas and feedback. During that time, the video was set to “public” and could be seen by anyone. One of my friends even said to me “why did you put that on youtube? What if someone steals your idea!?” And I laughed and laughed at that notion. And then I stopped laughing because I realized I had made a very stupid mistake. I named the video “Doritos Storyboard.” Because the word “Doritos” was in the title, any CTSB contestant who went to youtube to study last year’s winning entries or actual Doritos commercials could have found and watched my storyboard.

I’ve been burned by plagiarism before so I went back to youtube and deleted the storyboard. But by then it had already been up for like a week. A few days later, I changed some of the dialogue in my script and created a slightly tweaked version of the animated storyboard. On October 12th I uploaded that video to youtube except I named this one simply “dortest” so that it would be hidden from youtube’s search engine. It’s still online. Here it is:

I hate to think the worst of people like this but if you think I’m going overboard, try a little experiment. Open The Casket in one window and my storyboard video in the other. Then hit “Play” on them as fast as you can so you can watch them simultaneously. The shots line up better than Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. I can maybe understand that two separate filmmakers could come up with the same ideas, but what are the odds they’d use the same site gags at the same moments??

I really have no idea what to think about this. I know it’s just speculation on my part but I think I might have declare shenanigans on the makers of The Casket. At the very least, I think it’s plausible that somewhere out there, another filmmaker who was planning on entering the CTSB contest went on to youtube and searched for “Dortios” related videos. If they “Sorted by date,” my storyboard would have been right up in their face. The storyboard seems too crazy to ever shoot (seriously, what kind of a nut would get a real casket and have a real grave dug?) so maybe they assumed it would never really be filmed and so the concept was fair game.

Or maybe it was the CIA. I dunno. At this point I’m pretty open to any possibilities.

1/6/2010 UPDATE: Well, Doritos announced their Top 6 finalists on Monday and I was extremely disappointed to see that “The Casket” made the cut. For making the top 6 they receive $25,000, a trip to the superbowl and a chance to see their ad air during the game. If their ad does air, they could win a bonus of up to 2 million dollars.

After writing this blog post I contacted Doritos and informed them of my plagiarism concerns and explained the situation. I received a response saying that the Doritos legal team would look into the matter.

So even though the company’s lawyers knew there might be a chance the idea was stolen the judges decided to choose it anyway. Since 40% of a video’s score was based on “originality” I cannot understand how “The Casket” could have gotten a high enough score to make the Top 6. There were 4000 entries. Common sense tells you that a fair judging system would yield many videos that were just fractions of a point away from making the top 6. So a serious deduction in any category should theoretically sink any videos chances.

Now that Doritos has chosen “Casket” as a finalist, a new and even bigger problem has presented itself. Even if the idea was not stolen from me, “Casket” should have been disqualified because it infringes on my copyright. Copyright infringement can happen on accident but that does not give the infringer a free pass to benefit from their actions. Unintentional copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. My storyboard animation for “Rest in Chips” was first posted to the web the first week in October. The version that is on youtube now was uploaded October 12th. On October 29th I posted the first rough cut of my entry to my youtube channel. It, and several other rough cuts are still there. That first rough cut was on line 4 days before “Casket” was even filmed. And finally, my entry was uploaded to the contest site well before “Casket” was.

This all means that I am the owner and creator of the “Dead man has his last wish to be buried in chips fulfilled but during the funeral he is revealed to be alive inside the casket full of chips that gets knocked over” story idea. If a commercial was running on TV right now that was as similar to “Casket” as my entry, storyboard and rough cuts are, the judges would never have been able to select “Casket” as a finalist because Doritos would be sued for IP theft and copyright infringement regardless of whether or not the concept was intentionally stolen. My rights as an independent filmmaker are the same as a multi-million dollar corporation. Just because my storyboard or entry have not aired on TV, it does not mean my Intellectual Property rights don’t count.

Since Doritos knew that I was concerned about plagiarism and since they knew that I have proof that I was the first person to publicly release this idea, I feel personally offended that they chose to ignore my rights and concerns. Back in the newspaper days, they used to say “never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink buy the barrel.” Let’s update that statement for the modern age and say that you should “never pick a fight with a filmmaker who has a blog and nothing to lose.”

More details about these new developments here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/04/one-of-the-crash-the-superbowl-finalists-revealed-early/ and here: http://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/05/doritos-2010-crash-the-superbowl-finalists/

Oh my God! It’s been months since Careerbuilder announced that a winner had been selected in their “Hire My TV ad” commercial contest. But they never actually announced WHO that winner was. I had assumed that they wanted the winning video to be a surprise when it aired during the superbowl. (the point of the contest was to create an “idea” for a commercial. The winning video would be re-shot and maybe aired during the 2010 superbowl.) So I was shocked when I checked the contest site today and saw that the winners had been posted. I was even more shocked that there were 3 (three!?) winners and not one.

The grand prize in this contest was $100,000. Or at least it was supposed to be. I have to guess that Careerbuilder split that prize money among the three winning videos. The winners in this contest were selected by Careerbuilder and voting had no effect on the outcome. Also, keep in mind that production quality didn’t really matter toooo much since the commercial that airs during the superbowl would be re-shot.

Winner #1

Winner #2

Winner #2



So yeah…those are good. I could see the first and third one on TV. It’s weird but both of them feature a boss giving a “bad” employee a high-five for their weird behavior. How the second video won I have no idea. It’s kind of funny but it promotes the negative “angry black lady” stereotype and would probably make some people unhappy if it actually aired.

So which video will be re-shot? Here’s what the contest site says about that:

“Thanks to all of you who submitted videos for our hiremytvad contest. There were so many great videos that it was difficult to just pick one. We have chosen three as our grand prize winners!! Take a look at our grand prize winners and the winner of the Fan Favorite contest below and watch the Big Game airing on or about February 7th, 2010 to see if one of the co-grand prize winners is selected for our commercial.”

Catch that big “IF” in there? I have a feeling that none of these commercials will be re-shot for the superbowl. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one on them (Burrito town) aired on TV, as is.