Toyota Canada recently announced the winner of their Hosers-Only (my term, not theirs) Toyota 4Runner contest. Contestants were supposed to make a video explaining why they loved 4Runners…or something. It wasn’t really clear. The thing that caught my eye about this contest is the way Toyota picked their 10 finalists. 9 finalists were picked by judges and 1 was picked by a public, online vote. That type of finalist selection is a great way for a sponsor to have their cake and eat it too. Anywho, here’s the video that wound up winning the top prize.
About two weeks back I blogged about Dortios’ Canadian video contest, Viralocity. The objective was to come up with a name for Doritos’ new mystery flavor chip and then make a video explaining the suggestion. The winner was to be determined by points that were earned by how many views, stars, tweets, posts, links etc a video got.
The maker of that video apparently has an online fan base so big that his other entry was also ranked #3. But the Viralocity contest ended last Wednesday and the next day Doritos announced that another video had scored the most points and was the winner of the $100,000 prize. Aside from the money, Doritos is also going to name the mystery flavor the winning suggestion. Here it is:
First Place. Prize: $100,000
That’s an amusing video and Spice 2.0 is a decent name for a chip. It’s especially appropriate considering the nature of the contest. So Doritos really dodged a bullet here. What would they have done if the racist entry had managed to stay in first place? Would the company really want to stand up and say “Congratulations to our winner, Peter Chao for his hilarious video about how funny Asians are when they try and speak English!”
I’m glad the racist New Moon parody video didn’t win but….you can’t help but wonder if maybe that video had some “help” slipping into second place. After all, the point system Doritos devised is complicated and contestants don’t get a full accounting of where all of their points came from. This reminds me of the movie Election. Remember that one? Matthew Broderick was the teacher who ran the Student body president election? And Reese Witherspoon was the perfect, horrible candidate Tracy Flick? Matthew Broderick’s character was in charge of officially counting the ballots and after he realized Tracy had won by one vote, he just crumpled up two of her votes and declared the nice guy she was running against the winner. If Doritos wanted to rig this contest it would be just as simple as crumpling up (or adding) a few thousand electronic points. If they did that, who would ever know? Just maybe the head of the contest and one IT guy.
But I don’t think that happened. I’m sure the Spice 2.0 guy won fair and square. Peter Chao probably slipped out of first because he exhausted his fan base early on. The Spice 2.0 video was funny and topical so it kept getting passed on.
So I don’t believe that Doritos did anything unfair here. But fans of Peter Chao do. If you check out his and Doritos-Canada’s Facebook pages you’ll see a lot of angry comments from them there. The hilarious irony is that many of them are accusing Doritos of racism! They suspect that Doritos rigged the contest because they didn’t want the winner to be Asian. Sometimes, when I see how stupid some of the people of the Internet can be, I fear very much for our future.
Whatever happened, don’t feel too bad for that racist goofball. His two videos scored 2nd and 3rd place and so he should be receiving $15,000 and $10,000 prize. Lots of other cash prizes are going to people who scored well. You can see all those winners here:
Any video that scored 14th place or better will get at least $1,000. Most of the videos aren’t too great though since this was a contest about “viralocity” and not quality. That’s just one reason why running this kind of social network-fueled contest is a bad idea. Another reason is that everyone who didn’t win walks away pissed at the sponsor. Just go to Peter Chao’s facebook page and look and see how many of his 100,000+ fans are screaming “Boycott Doritos!”
The happy dude in that pic right here is Ben Southall. Last spring his audition video took first place out of more than 34,000 submissions in the “Best Job in the world” video contest. His prize was to spend 6 months “working” as Tourism Queensland’s Islands Caretaker. Basically the lucky bastard was a paid spokesman and his biggest duty was blogging about his experiences in the islands around the great barrier reef.
Last week, during the final days of Ben’s 6 month gig, he was out jet-skiing when he was stung by some super-tiny but crazy-deadly jellyfish. He rushed right to the hospital and the doctor knew right away he had been zapped by a “Irukandji” and fixed him up. But it sounds like it was sort of a close call. Apprently at least two people in Australia have died from Irukandji stings since 2002. Again, that dude is one lucky bastard.
So Ben is fine and probably back to the real world now. You can read all about his jellyfish encounter on his Best Job in the World blog. And hey, I found the video that got him his nearly-fatal gig. Here it is:
I’ve seen a whole lot of lot of wining video contest entries in my day but damn, this has certainly got to be one of the weirder ones. It’s the grand prize winner of the “Why I love my Hardie Home contest.” Hardie is apparently a brand of siding and to enter you had to live in a house that has some and then create a video explaining why it’s so great. First prize was 3 months worth of mortgage payments in the form of a check for Nine grand. Here’s the winner:
Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $9,000
See? I told you that was weird. And what do you think it cost to make that video? Maybe 20 bucks for a DV tape, a cigar and a bag of fake snow? 20 bucks and those people turned it into 9,000 bucks. Not bad. And no, that video didn’t win thanks to an online vote. Judges picked that video.
I entered my first video contest about 2 years ago and back then, winning contests was incredibly easy. Few people entered and even fewer people made quality entries. So as long as you were willing to put a little time and effort into your video (like these Hardie Home contestants did) you’d probably walk away with a big prize. Production values mattered little since most contest organizers didn’t expect real filmmakers to enter. They wanted average joes to shoot entries with their home video cameras. And if you could actually see and hear everything that happened in the video, well that was just a bonus. Just last year I myself won a $5,000 prize in a contest thanks to a video I shot on a $250 camera I bought at walmart….and then returned. (my way of sticking it to the man) It was a pretty hilarious video if I do say so myself but it certainly wasn’t broadcast quality by a long shot. But it was funny and interesting and at the time, that’s all it took to win a giant check.
The quality of the videos that were winning video contests prior to 2009 didn’t seem to matter very much. And that’s because companies weren’t using contests as a way to get high-quality advertising content. The CONTEST was supposed to be the advertising tool. Hardie Siding gave one person $9,000 but in exchange, a whole lot of people now know what Hardie is. (like me) The announcement of a video contest is newsworthy enough that Hardie probably got $9,000 of free advertising out of it. Just google “I love my Hardie Home” and see how many places the details of the contest appeared.
But things have changed fast in the last year or so. Real filmmakers have discovered video contests and video contest have discovered real filmmakers. That’s because companies have realized they not only can get free advertising out of a video contest, but they can also get a free ad that they can use forever. And on the other side of the equation, filmmakers have realized that their expensive camera and green screen and editing software is just collecting dust while they sit around and collect unemployment so maybe they should do something constructive with their free time and enter a video contest or two.
The point to my ramblings is this; watch that video that won the “I Love My Hardie Home” contest because you won’t be seeing many big-money winners like that anymore. Hardcore filmmakers have taken over the game and the amateurs are being pushed out. (Except in cases where the winners are picked by some kind of web vote. In those cases, you can pretty much guarantee that the winning video will be a lame piece of junk made by some nut who has enough time on his hands to vote for himself over and over.) But in the contests where judges pick the winners, it’s gonna be quality stuff from here on out. The only reason a non-pro didn’t swoop in and win the Hardie Home contest is because only people who have houses with that specific kind of siding could enter. I even briefly considered searching for someone with Hardie siding on their house so I could make a really slick entry about them! Wow…I guess I should have looked a little harder and maybe gone for it.
Ecompliments.com held a video contest where entrants were supposed to like, compliment somebody…I think. The actual rules or even the point of the whole thing don’t really matter. What matters is that the winner of the 10 Grand was decided by a public vote.
Letting “the public” pick the winner of a video contest is bad enough. But the organizers took things a step further and allowed the public to start voting before the end of the submission deadline. That means that the first people to upload videos had a huge advantage. Here’s the video that went on to win the top spot:
First Place. Prize: $10,000
That video wound up receiving 3,195 votes but the second place video (who won nothing) had only 1585 votes. This begs the question, how did such a blowout occur?
Turns out the dude who won the 10K has a huge youtube following. He does a web show called The DeFranco Update and he has himself 104,273 subscribers to his youtube channel! He added a link to his video so that if any of his fans wanted to vote for him all they had to do was click, register and vote. So did any of those 3,195 voters watch any of the other videos before they decided that the Defraco Report guy’s entry was the best? Of course not. They just voted for the guy they already liked and then moved on.
And I don’t blame Defranco Report guy for this one bit. Yes he had an advantage over the other contestants because he already had a fan base but you can’t hold it against the guy for making the most of the opportunity when it came along. I’ve had some videos go viral before and though it’s fun to see your view count rise, you can’t help but wish there was some way to make real money off of all those clicks. So the winner of the contest just found a unique way to make money off his internet celebrity.
The organizers of the contest seem to realize that they basically messed up and held a $10,000 popularity contest. The Ecompliments contest website says…..
“We will be running a new contest with new rules in January. A panel will determine the winner based on a combination of factors. Although votes will be a primary factor it will not be the only one. The video requirements will be more tightly focused on “compliments” and “sharing the good.” There will be a grand prize and prizes for second and third place.”
Sounds like they probably got whole lot of complaints about how the winner was picked. But good for them for doing a whole new contest. Hey, maybe I can shoot an entry for the new contest where I compliment the organizers for doing a new and improved contest!
This week Poptent announced a bunch of videos that have won awards or have been purchased by various brands. This video was purchased by .INFO for $5K. The creator of this video has some crazy post-production skills. It’s very professional…and trippy. To fully appreciate this one, you might want to go do a couple bong hits before viewing:
A filmmaker from LA named Angela Kholer won both the $10,000 jury prize and the $10,000 audience award in the “Your Amazon Ad” contest. On the contest page there’s a little story about how the video was created. Their concept was to do an Ad for the Amazon Kindle:
“On a plane from Japan to Thailand, we brainstormed ideas and sketched out little stories that our character could fall into following different literary genres. We scribbled out pictures on napkins and made a flip-book, putting the little scenes in different orders. The day of the shoot, we gutted a pillow to make clouds and smoke (a last-minute addition) and did the commercial in one seven-hour take.”
Here’s the video. I can’t embed it so click on the image to view it:
Pretty f#%&ing amazing right?
In all, the filmmakers shot more than 300 frames for their human stop-motion animation. That was a huge amount of effort and those folks certainly earned their winnings. However…there seem to be a lot of disgruntled people on the Amazon contest site. Some of the other contestants are upset about Amazon’s choices for the finalist slots. People are complaining that the five finalist videos (which you can see here) are too good!! Ha! Is that a refreshing change or what!? Usually other contestants are mad because the winning videos suck. In this case, contestants are mad because Amazon only selected videos that seemed (to commenters on the contest site) to have been created by professional filmmakers.
I have actually seen these types of complaints before. Non-pro video contestants feel like they are given false hope by contest organizers. They assume the contest will be for amateurs only so they shoot a video with their Flip camera and assume they have a shot at winning a big pile of cash. But then when a slick, HD video is selected as the winner they feel like the “little guys” never really had a shot at winning.
I can sort of understand this line of thought but yo…..$20,000 was up for grabs! It always amazes me that in every big contest half the entries will be poorly shot, badly lit and have terrible sound. Why would Amazon want to give thousands of dollars to an amateur-looking video?
Even though so much money was at stake there seems to be a real “anti-budget” mentality in the discussion boards on the contest site. Contestants who didn’t have much money to spend feel that people who are already rich enough to own high-end cameras had an unfair advantage. There’s even one discussion where contestants proudly compare their hyper-low budgets.
Like I said, I get the frustration but “best video wins” is the name of the game. If you’re new to video contests here is one thing you must lean and accept: Production Quality DOES matter. You don’t need a super expensive HD camera and full crew though. I once won $5,000 in a contest using a $250 camera from Walmart…which I returned after the shoot.
Videos need to be compressed to be posted to the web and that compression really levels the playing field. As long as you can SEE all the action that is taking place in your video and as long as you can HEAR everything that is going on and as long as the script is good enough that the viewer CARES about what is happening then you will have a shot at winning. You just need to learn how to make the most out of the gear you have. Just look at the video that started this discussion. Did it really take a lot of money or expensive gear to shoot that? No way. The only things it took was creativity and ingenuity. As long as you have plenty of that you’ll be a serious contender in any contest you enter.
Ok, that video is just awesome. If there’s one thing I love it’s sandwiches and if there are two things I love it’s sandwiches and bears. That video is great for a lot of reasons but for one it just goes to show that you don’t need a fancy camera or slick editing to win a contest. Sometimes all you need is a funny idea and a stuffed bear. So kudos to Evan and Carl. Nice work. The canned bear roar coming from the motionless bear is what totally makes this one.
It never fails. In every, single video contest there is almost always one rap entry. It’s a no brainer. It’s the easiest way to get a lot of required information out quickly and in a possibly amusing way. I myself once filmed a rap video for a contest and the entry went on to win $5,000. But that was way back in 2007 when the concept was still fresh. Today, the rap video idea is pretty played out. Even though there is always at least one rap video submitted to every contest, it seems like the rap videos never, ever win. Oh…until now.
A few weeks back I blogged about the Department of Health and Human services Swine Flu PSA contest. Apparently the got more than 200 entries and for once, a rap video beat out all the other contenders. Here’s the winner.
First place. Prize: $2,500 and a national TV spot.
What cracks me up about this video is that the guy is a real doctor! Guess Health and Human services thought that’d be a nice hook for a TV spot. You can read more about the contest and the winner on the ….official white house website?? Holy crap. That’s a pretty sweet prize in and of itself. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Rapping-Doctor-Wins-H1N1-Video-Contest/
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.
