Poor Canada. Those chip-loving hosers weren’t eligible to participate in Dorito’s Crash the Superbowl commercial contest. But now that CTSB is over, Fritolay decided that our neighbors to the north deserved a contest of their own. So they launched a new video contest, “Doritos Viralocity,” just for them.
The premise of “Viralocity” is pretty neat but the execution is just….whoa, kinda nuts. Doritos released a new, un-named flavor of chips in Canada and asked the public to name it. Entrants were supposed to shoot a video that shows why the new flavor should get their suggested name. Like I said, it’s a cool idea.
If I were eligible to enter, I'd have called them "Beardy's Choice"
But considering how well-executed the Crash the Superbowl contest was, “Viralocity” is just plain crazy and confusing. The winner of the contest and the recipient of the $100,000 (CD) grand prize will be the video that goes the most viral. Doritos has a whole system of points set up to measure viralness. For example, every time a Canadian views an entry, that entry gets 5 points. But if someone outside Canada watches an entry, it gets 100 points. And each time it gets facebooked or tweeted or Dugg, different points are awarded. Some accomplishments can get you as many as 1,000 points. If you’re interested in the specifics, click here to see the full breakdown.
So what’s wrong with this system? Well for one, it’s basically just a giant online free-for-all. There’s no way Doritos could ever track all those views and clicks and posts so if someone really wanted to inflate their video’s score, it’d be very easy.
But worse than that though, it seems like the contest was almost intentionally designed to pick a terrible, horrible winner. Anyone who knows how the internet works could tell you that this contest is going to be won by some annoying guy with an idiotic show on youtube that’s super-popular with tweens and his video would some how be related to something those tweens really, really love. Like, I dunno…Twilight or something. There are still 10 days to go before the final scores are tallied but right now, it looks like this video, with a score of 1,852,667 points will probably wind up being the winner:
I knew the most “popular” video wouldn’t be very good but I never expected it to be straight up racist! Yeah the guy in the video is asian but that doesn’t mean it’s no big deal if he runs around mocking Chinese people. If that video wins, is Doritos really going to want to associate themselves with such an offensive caricature?
As expected, this dude who made that video has a very, very, very popular and his “show” is just one big joke about negative Asian stereotypes. In fact, this guy’s channel is so popular that his other entry in the contest is now ranked #3. If his videos were awesome this wouldn’t bother me but both entries are lame and the flavor names he picked have no relation to the videos. And it sorta seemed like that was the point of the contest. The only reason this dude is going to win is because he has a big social network. That means that every single filmmaker that actually tried to make a decent entry for this contest wasted their time.
Doritos should have seen this coming a mile away. When you let the internet decide what’s popular, you’re gonna wind up with some pretty lame, offensive, lowest-common-denominator type stuff.
And trust me, this guy IS probably going to win. The Viralocity website is set-up in such a way that you can see the most-popular videos. Since the Asian-bashing Twilight spoof is ranked #1, everyone is going to click it out of curiosity….and that of course keeps jacking the video’s score higher and higher.
It looks like Doritos managed to get a whopping 1,200 entries for this contest. If you’d like to sort through them, here’s the video gallery: http://www.doritosviralocity.ca/Gallery.aspx
