Yo, suck on these!

I try and follow what goes on over on Poptent.net pretty closely and over the last few months I’ve noticed an odd trend developing.  It seems like more and more companies are running video “assignments” on Poptent that are sort of like the first phase of a larger video contest.  The brand’s judges review all the Poptent submissions they receive and then they select several finalists.  These finalists each get paid a few thousand dollars so the brand can post their videos on their websites or facebook pages for a few weeks.  Once the finalist videos are posted, fans of the sponsor are invited to vote on their favorite “consumer made” ads and the video that gets the most votes wins a big, fat cash prize.  So basically, companies are using Poptent so they can have their cake and eat it too.  Since there is so much talent over on Poptent the brand is almost sure to get a ton of high-quality videos to choose from.  (Bonus: they also don’t need to worry about non-winners posting their embarrassing, low-quality or offensive videos elsewhere on the web.)  And then when they run the second phase of the contest they also get the social media exposure that comes with running an online vote.  When all is said and done, the brand gets high-quality content, the are technically no “losers” so the fans don’t feel like the sponsor wasted their time, the sponsor’s website or facebook page gets tons of traffic and the directors that made the finals get at least a little cash for their trouble.

So it’s an interesting contest model.  But it really only works if all phases of the contest are run well.  The people at poptent obviously know what they’re doing so Phase One is guaranteed to run pretty smoothly.  But these types of contest can easily crash and burn once the brand takes over and launches the contest phase.  Case in point: Jolly Rancher’s Crunch ‘N Chew video contest.  Late last year Hershey’s ran a Poptent video assignment for their new product, Crunch ‘N Chew Jolly Ranchers.  In total they recived 189 videos which is a hell of a lot of submissions for a Poptent contest.  On Monday the company announced that they had picked three finalists and each winning filmmaker would be getting $2,500.  Then all three videos were posted on Jolly Rancher’s website for a month-long public vote.  After 30 days, the video with the most votes will be purchased by Hershey’s for $7.500.  And the winning filmmaker will be paid an additional $10,000 so they can produce two sequels to their first video. Hershey’s built a beautiful and simple webpage for the contest.  You can see it and all three of the finalist videos by clicking on this image:

Click to check out the actual site

As you can see, one video has already managed to get over 3,000 votes in about 4 days!  (Note: I’m writing this on Thursday night and the voting began on Monday morning.)  The website says you can “vote once a day” but 3,245 votes in 4 days still equals 811 votes a day!  That’s insane.  Unless you’re an Internet superstar, you’re not going to be able to pull down numbers like that.  So where are all those votes coming from?  Well, I did a little test and if you want to vote multiple times in this contest all you have to do is clear your web browser’s history and refresh the page.  Yep, it’s that easy.  You can vote an infinite number of times that way.

So I’m going to guess that most of Video #2′s votes came from the same computer.  Last night at 12:45AM I took a screenshot of the contest site and video #2 had 2,258 votes.  Nine hours later I checked the site again and video #2 was up to 3,022 votes.  So that video gained 764 votes overnight.  Right now it is 9PM on thursday night.  Since 10AM video #2 has only gained 223 votes.  How does a video get 764 votes in the middle of the night but only 223 votes during the day?  The only answer that makes any sense is that somebody stayed up all night voting for the same video over and over.

So these guys are cheaters and they should be disqualified immediately….right?  Wrong.  As far as I’m concerned anyone who casts multiple votes in this contest isn’t doing a damn thing wrong.  If you cheat in a contest you should get disqualified.  But “cheating” is BREAKING THE RULES.  And guess what?

The Jolly Ranchers video contest has no rules.

Seriously.  I’m not trying to be hyperbolic.  There are literally no rules for this contest.  The finalists have received no instructions from the sponsor and there are no rules on the contest site.  And if there are no rules, how can you possibly cheat???  The website says that “You can vote once per day through February 15th!”  But a single, random sentence isn’t legally binding.  And the site certainly doesn’t say you “may not vote more than once per day.”  How are contestants supposed to know what is ok and what isn’t if the sponsor doesn’t bother to tell them?  If Hershey’s REALLY didn’t want people to vote more than once a day, why did they make it so easy to vote over and over?

So frankly, you can’t blame the repeat voters.  The blame here belongs to whoever set up the voting phase of this contest.  I’m simply amazed that someone built that site without realizing people could easily vote for themselves as many times as they wanted.  I mean for Christsakes, $17,500 is at stake.  It’s just human nature to want to do everything you can to win a prize like that.  In fact, I don’t believe that no one realized this would happen.  I’m going to guess that the poor web designer or IT guy who set up the contest site probably tried in vain to explain to the marketing folks running this project that it was going to devolve into a pointless vote-a-thon.  I’ve been a tech and I spent years working with people in marketing.  They seem to just have a biological aversion to hearing about technical problems.  They pretty much just plug their ears and don’t want to acknowledge that something could go wrong.  And if they have to choose between fixing an important technical issue or preserving their vision well…their vision wins out every time.  So some marking person somewhere probably got the idea in their head that voting in this contest should be as simple as possible.  And the vision of a one-click vote wound up trumping common sense.

But as I said, the voting period in this contest lasts until February 15th.  That’s a long ways away.  Hershey’s still has plenty of time to fix this.  Because there are no rules the sponsor has no grounds to disqualify anyone.  And really, they don’t even have cause to throw out any of the votes.  But what they can do is post some freaking RULES.  Then if people get caught breaking those rules the company will have grounds to disqualify them.  But really, I think the smart thing to do at this point is just cancel the vote and pick a winner.  And maybe they can give the non-winners a little extra cash to compensate for what they’ve had to go through this week.  Seriously, this is one of the biggest video contest debacles I’ve ever seen and I would be freaking out if I had to endure a month-long, phony voting process. Right now this is a voting contest, not a video contest and that just sucks.

THURSDAY NIGHT UPDATE:  I was going to wait until Friday morning to post this but I’ll publish it now.  It’s now a little after 12:45AM and Video #2 is now up to 3734 votes.  That means that video received 1,476 votes in the span of 24 hours.  And 480 votes came in between the hours of 9PM and 1AM tonight.  That’s twice the number of votes that video got all day on Thursday.  Again, it’s not really possible to cheat in a contest where there are no rules but someone does seem to be voting for one of the entries over and over.  So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if anyone at Hershey’s cares enough to do anything about this.

MONDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE:  Unfortunately, Hershey’s hasn’t done a thing to try and stop this out of control contest.  In fact, they have let things get much, much worse.  Video #2 is now up to 10,134 votes.  That means they got about 6,000 votes in 4 days.  But now, the team who created Video #1 have also apparently decided to try and win this contest.  Yesterday Video #1 had about 1,000 votes.  Today they have 4,000 votes!  As I keep saying, this contest has no rules so none of this can count as cheating.  But I have to ask, what the hell does Hersey gain from running a joke of a contest like this?

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE:  Someone who called himself “Jolly Fan” left a comment accusing me of being the creator of the video that has the least number of votes in this contest.  Just for the record, I am not.  I didn’t even enter the Jolly Rancher assignment.  Click the comments button to see “Jolly Fan’s” very un-friendly message.  If you read between the lines it seems pretty obvious that Jolly Fan is actually the creator of Video #2.

What is "Dot TV"? I actually have no idea

Beardy’s Note:  For the first time ever, VCN is presenting a guest post that was written by an author who would prefer to remain anonymous.  Here’s how this article came to be:  A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a filmmaker and long-time reader of VCN that was having problem’s with .tv’s “Watch Dot TV” video contest.  The filmmaker had made the finals in the contest and he had a shot at winning the $10,000 grand prize.  The winner of of the contest was supposed to be determined  by facebook votes.  But right away, the voting seemed pretty fishy.  I’ll let our anonymous author tell the rest of the story but as you can probably guess, it doesn’t end well.  Initially I planned to do an article about this debacle myself but I knew the filmmaker could tell his own story better than I ever could.  This contest got pretty ugly and the filmmaker got screwed by the sponsors pretty badly so I suggested that we run this article without revealing the filmmaker’s name.

———————–

In the wild west of online video contests, Watch Dot TV, a part of the large Verisign corporation, has set a new low in taking advantage of its contestants. In October they solicited entries and their judges chose the top 10 videos who competed for public votes.   First Prize was $10,000, Second Prize was a Canon 7Dand Third Prize was a Panasonic GH2.

The voting in this contest ended more than a month ago and Dot TV is now over a week late announcing the winners.  They have not issued a single statement despite the plethora of agitated comments on their Facebook wall. Watch Dot Tv’s continued silence is the loudest admission of guilt they could make. They even went so far as to delete people’s comments on their wall demanding accountability.

So what happened?

During the voting, each Facebook user was allowed one vote per day and after 4 days the top two entries had around 500 votes. Within hours the top two increased their lead on the third place by almost double what it took them days to accumulate. After this anomaly I discovered how the top two entries had gotten a huge lead: They exploited an error in the voting system that allowed for more than one vote a day.

Simply opening the voting page in a new tab, or even refreshing the page would allow for multiple votes. I immediately emailed the contest administrator to make them aware of the voting system error and that it has already been taken advantage of by the top two entries.

They responded and said they could not recreate this simple error on their own.

This was the major red flag. I was not trying to explain the error to an Amish craftsman, this was an internet company that could not open their own Facebook page in a new tab and recreate the error.

The two entries had already gained an insurmountable lead and the contest administrator was turning a blind eye. My fear was that they would find and fix the error I made them aware of and then deny it ever existed, meanwhile the two entries would continue to win, and Watch Dot TV would have averted a PR headache.

That’s when I decided to expose the error by voting repeatedly so it could not be ignored and brushed under the rug. As soon as I gained a lead on two winning entries, within minutes, they began exploiting the error to regain their lead. I called in reinforcements to gain such a lead that the two entries would give up, be exposed as exploiting the error, and Watch Dot TV would have to restart the competition. I did gain a 1,000 vote lead and the two entries did stop trying to keep up, so now it was just up to Watch Dot TV to fix the error and restart the competition.

Watch Dot TV’s solution was to reset the number of votes to a previous point in time that the two entries had already gained their lead by exploiting the error. When I commented on Watch Dot TV’s Facebook wall that they did not reset the votes to a point in time before the error occurred, they deleted my comment. Red flag number two.

Dot TV's facebook announcement

I continued to email them the timestamped screenshots I had taken when I exposed the voting error and asked them to address their mistake. There was only a few days left of voting for Watch Dot TV to fix this.

Watch Dot TV didn’t enjoy being called to account. After my pleas in emails and on their Facebook wall to restart the voting, they disqualified me and another entry from the contest. (Beardy’s Note:  For some mysterious reason, the sponsors did not disqualify the two original elleged cheaters.  It seems they only disqualified people who tried to beat those two contestants at their own game.)  The entry in first place remained in that position until the end of the voting period. He was even promising to donate 25% of the prize to the Invisible Children organization in an effort to gain more votes.

There were even people on his facebook wall claiming they were using multiple accounts to vote for his entry. His video also violated the contest’s Official Rules and should have never been chosen as a finalist. His entire video was created by using previously published work, a direct violation of the rules.

I have never seen such disrespectful behavior by a company towards people from which it solicited video entries.

To this day the winner has not been announced and Watch Dot Tv has not issued any statements. (Beardy’s Note:  The entire contest and all the entries have actually been removed from Dot TV’s facebook page)  My only hope is that if they did give the prize money to entry that remained in first, despite having exploited the voting error and violating the official rules, maybe 100% of his prize found its way to the Invisible Children organization.

Watch Dot TV should be ashamed of the unprofessional manner in which it operated the contest and its parent company Verisign should exercise it’s parental responsibilities and put its misbehaved child in permanent timeout.

—  Written by: Anonymous. To learn more about the Invisible Children fund, head here  —

Here are  few other random things I want to mention:

If you’re here for Crash the SuperBowl info, we’ll be running a whole bunch of posts about the contest over the next 2 1/2 months. Next week we’ll even be featuring an interview with one of the 2011 CTSB finalists.  And of course, we’ll post the Top 5 videos (along with reviews and analysis) as soon as Doritos makes the results public.

Next I want to say Thanks to all the filmmakers out there that sent in the links to their Doritos entries.  I’ve decided to extend my “free mini-review offer” for a few more days.  So far, I’ve crtiqued more than 100 submissions and I am pretty sure that at least one or two of the videos I’ve seen will wind up making the finals.  If you’d still like to get a mini-review of your ad, please post the link in the comment section of this article:  videocontestnews.com/2011/11/21/we-want-to-see-your-crash-the-super-bowl-entries/

As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to do the impossible this month.  I’m trying to watch at least a few seconds of every, single Crash the Super Bowl entry.  (By the way, there were just under 5,000 submissions this year.)  My goal is to compile a list of the 50 or so best submissions.  The list will be posted on December 14th.

If you’re a new reader, I just want to mention that Video Contest News is a year-round operation.  We run two or three posts a week about different contests.  If you’re having a problem with a contest, let us know!  Companies hate bad publicity and a single article about a crappy contest can sometimes inspire the sponsors to fix whatever has gone wrong.  Or hey, you can even let us know if you have some good news to report!  We post a lot of winning entries so if you’ve recently won a nice contest prize, I want to hear about it.  You can reach me here:  VideoContestNews@gmail.com.

Finally, if you like you can only stand to read 140 characters of video contest news at a time, follow us on twitter here.  This month we’ll be “following back” all of our new followers!

This summer, Mike’s Hard Lemonade asked their facebook fans to “Submit a humorous and original video demonstrating the determination, hustle and spirit you and/or your team bring to your favorite and fun “HARD SPORTS” activity, such as (but not limited to) kickball, dodgeball, ping pong, Ultimate Frisbee, or cornhole*.”  There was a public voting period but it was only run to determine a set of 20 finalists.  Then a panel of judges picked the top three winners.  First place was $10,000 to be used to support the winners sporting endeavors.  Second place was $5,000 and third was $2,500.  And as a bonus, the 17 non-winning finalists each recived a mike’s hard lemonade “Sponsorship Kit” that included stuff like Mike’s T-shirts, sweat bands and gym bags plus some sporting equipment.  Each of these kits had an AVR of $500.  So it was a pretty sweet runner-up prize.  Here’s the video that took the top prize.

Grand Prize Winner.  Prize:  $10,000:
 

Not too shabby. I really admire the fact that these guys decided to shoot in the rain. It really added to the wackiness of the video. If it had been me, I would have canceled the shoot for sure. So good for them for going for it.

Overall, this was a really nice of example of how to run a GOOD video contest on facebook. Yeah, there was public voting but there were 20 finalist slots so anybody who really cared could have made the second round pretty easily. And as I said, judges picked the winners so Mike’s was able to avoid pissing off a bunch of their fans by letting some cheater win the grand prize. And 17 runner up prizes worth $500 each really showed that Mike’s actually respected and appreciated all of their finalists. If by chance some contest organizer reads this post, I hope you’ll take a lesson from this contest. It was fun and fair and a good model to follow. The rules are still online if you want to read the fine print for yourself.

*I’m going to assume (and hope) that they type of corn-holing they are referring to is a game of bean bags.

When you think of Sunkist, you think of oranges, right?  I do, at least.  But apparently, Sunkist also grows lemons.  I know this because Sunkist just wrapped up their “Share your Twist on Sunkist Lemons” video contest.  For the contest, people were supposed to submit videos that showed the unique ways they used Sunkist lemons.  The grand prize?  $5,000.  The contest was run on facebook and like all facebook contests, “fans” could vote for their favorite entries.  But the folks at sunkist are pretty crafty.  They must have known that vote-based video contests always end with crappy winners and claims of cheating.  So sunkist decided to have their lemons and suck on them too.  Contestants were encouraged to get their friends to vote for their submissions but the fine print in the rules said that votes didn’t actually really matter.  Ha.  So in the end, Sunkist just picked whatever video they wanted.  And here is that video now:

Grand Prize Winner:  Prize:  $5,000:
 

 
I like it.  It’s cute.  And the tips are pretty damn good.  I might actually freeze some lemon slices and drop them in a glass of water sometime.  Plus I really liked that yellow backdrop that some of the actors were standing in front of.  I think I’m going to have to try and replicate that look.

Of course, this was a contest run on facebook so all the other contestants think the winner is horrible.  Here’s a little tip from Beardy…If you lose a contest, it’s ok to say that you’re unhappy with who won.  But don’t be a bad sport about it.  There’s no need to post comments personally attacking the winners.  They didn’t do anything wrong.  Check out some of the uglier comments that were left on the winning video:

ya’ll should used the winnings to get lemon drop some invisaline!

I have lost all faith in humanity and will renounce God as a result of the blistering ineptitude in picking a good video. Not only will I never eat lemons again but I will do everything within my power to make sure the lemon industry as a whole recedes into history because of this one video. Shame on you Sunkist. This has all the appeal of watching a sock puppet play in a cancer ward.

I thought this vid was ok, except I didn’t think it would win because of the girl with the greasy lips and tattoos– not clean looking or flattering to the lemons. Like a heroin addict pimping a lemon. Congrats on your win though!

Yeah, people are assholes.  Please don’t do that kind of stuff.  It’s just not cool.  Making fun of the winners’ looks aren’t’ going to get the sponsor to change their minds.  It’s just pointless cruelty.

Anyway, There were also five runners up who each recived $1,000.  If you’re in desperate need of some lemon-related tips and tricks, head here to watch all the winners.

On the set of "T is for Table"

What I really want to do is direct…

As a filmmaker, I like to enter video contests because it allows me to make mini films while getting feedback on my work and occasionally winning a few bucks.  However, every now and again, a contest comes along that I would enter even if the prize was a bag of jelly beans because the reward could be so much greater if successful. This is the case with Drafthouse Films’ The ABC’s of Death competition.

From website:

Established filmmakers and emerging new stars will make up the diverse roster of creative talent that will showcase these tales of termination, beginning alphabetically with the letter A and eradicating all life right through the letter Z..

Each director is assigned a letter and every letter represents a word that acts as a springboard to tell a short story about death. A linking device will open, connect and close.

Twenty-six directors will participate from all corners of the world: Australia, United Kingdom, Serbia, USA, Japan, Thailand, Chile, India, Denmark, Indonesia, Finland, Mexico, Belgium, Mexico, Spain and France.

This unique anthology will be a celebration of death in all its forms, from the shocking and exotic to the humorously droll. It’s up to each director to interpret the letter they are assigned as creatively and outrageously as they see fit.

So as a filmmaker how do I get involved? Well, they have not selected a director for the letter “T” and are holding a worldwide competition in which filmmakers are invited to make a short no longer than 4 minutes (not including credits). The winning filmmaker will become the 26^th director and their submission will be included in the final feature. One of the requirements is that the short start on a frame of red and end on a frame of red, and no pre-existing horror shorts are eligible.

The way it works, you upload your short to the site and then begin the process of begging for votes. You can vote once for each film, and the voting system makes you enter your email address and then confirm the vote through an email link for the vote to count. The 10 films with the most votes move on to the final round in which the other 25 directors then choose the winner. There is a caveat in the rules, which I think is pretty cool:

Producer Amendment. Producers reserve the right to add one, two or three shorts to the Top Ten (making it a Top Eleven, Twelve or Thirteen) if they feel great work is somehow being overlooked by the public voting system.

This is great, so if you were working on your film and got it in late with not enough time to accrue votes you still could get into the finals if the producers think your film is worthy, what a great idea.

Having my short appear as part of a feature length horror anthology gets me more excited than the million dollar prize Gain was offering up, I know that sounds crazy, but filmmakers are crazy.  I applaud Drafthouse Films for creating this contest, as there are so many filmmakers out there just looking for a chance for their work to be seen and competitions like this don’t come around often enough!

The short I entered in this contest is called “T is for Table” and it’s a concept that my father and I had the idea for and I am very excited to have brought it to life. So if you enjoy it please send me a vote and help me get into a top 10 that I hope is filled with quality films.  Prepping this shoot was the most extensive prep I ever had to do. A month before I shot I worked closely with a production designer I found on craigslist to build the table, once that was built he made the book and the drawings. I was able to borrow a friend’s Panasonic AF-100 for the shoot, this is a great camera it’s basically a DSLR in a camcorder body, so you can switch out the lenses and get that nice 35mm depth of field. I rented a pocket dolly and lit the film with LED lights.  I had a very small crew just myself and a sound guy, we pretty much did everything. All of the actors are people I know and have acting backgrounds . The post production was where it got tricky, I used two different effects artists, a mixer, and did color grading for the first time. I highly recommend color grading with someone who has properly calibrated monitors. I never trusted my computer monitors because they all looked different, so by going to a post house you can be sure to get your film represented properly. I also wanted this done fairly quickly so I could gather votes once the film was uploaded so I shot on August 28th and 29th and uploaded on Sept. 14th. All in all, I am very happy with the results and sometimes working on a deadline can be a great way to get a project done without procrastination.

I will also point out some other entries I think are really good and deserve a look, T is for Toilet, T is for Talk, T is for Tracking and T is for Toss.

Submissions end on Oct. 1^st but voting will continue until October 31^st and then the final winner is decided on November 15th.  To watch and vote for T is for Table, click here:  http://26th.theabcsofdeath.com/t-is-for-table/

—–     Posted by Shane Free. Twitter @freestyleflicks    —–