The deadline for Skinit.com’s big $50,000 video contest was Monday and it looks like they received at least 150 entries. I say “at least” because filmmakers are still uploading videos 4 days after the deadline. Skinit’s uploader is still active and it sends your video directly to the Skinit channel on youtube. To Skinit’s credit, very few entries that were uploaded after the June 1st deadline have been approved and added to their official contest gallery. But if you throw in the ineligible late entries, Skinit got about 175 submissions total. That’s quite impressive and I hope it means Skinit will bring the contest back next year. You can see all the videos that have thus far been uploaded here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SkinitTV
Though I had been planning for months to enter the Skinit contest I sort of waited until the very last minute to get to work. I finally settled on an idea about 2 weeks before the deadline which gave me just enough time to order and receive the skins I would need. If you remember, Skinit had 6 categories for this contest and one person in each category will win a $5,000 prize. The categories were 60 and 30 second Consumer Electronics skin commercials, 60 and 30 second wall skin commercials and 60 and 30 second Tailgate Skins commercials. I figured most people would enter the Consumer Electronics categories since those would be the cheapest and easiest ads to make. So I decided to go for the tailgate category and I’m quiet proud of the final product. All the actors I used are friends of mine and the shoot turned into an actual cookout. Throw in a dancing horse-man and you have a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I wound up getting so much footage that I was able to do a 30 second and a 60 second version of the entry. Here’s the 30 second version of my submission:
Skinit judges ultimately pick the winners but a piece of every contestants final score is based on votes. So if you have 30 seconds to spare, why not do your pal Beardy a solid and throw a couple 5 star votes his way. I could certainly use them. Jerks have already been giving me 1-star ratings to bring my score down.
So how about you? Did you enter the Skinit.com contest? I really like seeing what kind of entries our readers are doing so if you entered and would like a little help schilling for votes, e-mail me a link or leave it in a comment and I will add it to this post.
Here’s a very good entry from Shane F. I think this one is going to be a serious contender:
We’ll get back to covering the Taxslayer contest fiasco next week (actually, I managed to work some taxslayer stuff into this post after all) but for now I thought I’d cover a video contest that actually has its act together; the 2010 Skinit.com Spotlight video challenge.
I was really impressed with last year’s skinit video contest. It went very smoothly and they got a ton of great entries. I even posted an interview with one of the contest organizers and soon after, I got word that an even bigger version of the contest was planned for 2010. Well, Skinit certainly delivered on their promise. Last year the grand prize was 10 grand. This year they are giving out SIX prizes of $5,000 each plus one grand prize of $20,000. Yesterday, everyone who is on the taxslayer mailing list got an e-mail reminder about the nearing contest deadline. One of the many reasons I’m annoyed about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest is that instead of shooting TWO entries for them, I could have spent my time making entries for the Skinit contest. Well, there’s still 16 days to go and my “skins” are in the mail, so I should be able to get an entry in at the last minute.
One thing that really amazed me about last year’s skinit contest was that they actually TOLD YOU WHO WAS JUDGING IT! If you enter a lot of contests you know how frustrating it is to not know who was passing judgment on your work. In the reminder e-mail, skinit once again announce who this year’s judges are:
These people are all happy because the don't work for taxslayer.com
That e-mail also did crazy things like give handy tips you could follow to keep your entry from being disqualified. They also included <gasp> an e-mail address you could send questions to!! The taxslayer contest not only didn’t provide an e-mail address for questions, their website said that any questions you sent them will be ignored! In fact, the entire taxslayer contest site had kind of a rude, adversarial tone to it.
I never really thought about this before but I guess you can see a lot of the organizer’s personalities in the contests they set up. As I’ve learned, the head of the taxslayer contest is a mean, rude jerk who likes to ignore contestants and (allegedly) mock them and harass them. The one time I got him on the phone I could hear anger in his voice…before he hung up on me, I mean. The head of the taxslayer contest, Daniel Eubanks is also in charge of taxslayer’s auto racing endeavors. So I suspect that the annual video contest is just a hassle that he gets stuck with every year. Maybe that’s why the contest rules were so confusing. Maybe he was sick of the contest so he sabotaged it so that the company would drop the idea already so he could get back to blogging about race cars!
The people at Skinit though seem to actually enjoy running their video contest. They clearly respect the people that are spending time and money to make commercials for them. Unlike taxslayer, they seem to actually want people to enter their contest. OH! You know what? I think I get it; the people at skinit are probably really used to working with artists because that’s who designs all their skins. So they understand how creative people think and how they deal with things like requirements and deadlines. But the people at Taxslayer (AKA Rhodes Financial Services) are all money-minded people who live in a world of facts and figures. Daniel Eubanks probably never has to deal with creative people. That must be why it was so easy for them to cancel their video contest! Obviously, their NUMBERS told them the best thing to do would be to cut their losses and maybe pick up a few entries on the cheap later in the year. They clearly didn’t care about wasting a bunch of filmmakers time and money. It wasn’t their time and money so why should they worry about it? Their reputation might take a hit but right now, they’ll save a few grand.
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!
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!
Seems like every marketing guy and their momma is trying to entice us Joe Handycams into shooting ads for their company these days. There’s a lot of cash and a ton of prizes waiting to be won in online video contests and if you have even a smidge of writing, shooting or editing skills, all that awesome stuff could be yours. So you guys focus on winning ‘em and we’ll cover the aftermath of your glorious victories and/or pathetic defeats!
Video contests can get pretty ugly. Organizers do not always want to play by their own rules, other contestants flagrantly cheat and poorly run competitions cause frustrations for everyone. Wish you could bring a problem to the attention of a contest’s organizers but you’re worried that you might be branded a no-good troublemaker? We can help. Let us know about your problem and we’ll try and kick a little ass on your behalf. E-mail us at Videocontestnews@gmail.com.
