The Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Alliance announced the winners of their AMD Awareness video contest this week. This was a big one. First place was $10,000, second was $2,000 and third and fourth place was $1,000 each. The point of the contest was pretty straightforward; make a video explaining what AMD is, what the symptoms are and encourage people to get tested. Here’s the winner:

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?