I call Shenanigans! Sling Baby's "head of social media" calls on fans to attack their competition.

On Tuesday night, filmmaker and three-time Crash the Super Bowl finalist Kevin T. Willson became the fourth person ever to win the million dollar ad meter bonus in Doritos’ annual commercial contest.  But unlike the other three times directors have won that honor, Willson’s victory isn’t anything worth celebrating.  In fact, the way he “won” his bonus money is so shameful I think his win might wind up being a black mark on the reputation of the entire field of “crowdsourced” advertising.

As I explained in my last post, this year USA Today ran TWO versions of their annual Super Bowl ad meter poll.  The traditional poll got its scores from viewers in private focus groups and the results were released on Sunday night.  This year, USA Today’s focus groups declared the Crash the Super Bowl entry “Man’s Best Friend” to be the best commercial of the game.  (A great call, BTW)  As is tradition, Doritos will award a bonus of one million dollars to the creator of Man’s Best Friend for pulling off such an amazing feat.

But USA Today’s second ad meter poll was touted as a chance for “the public” to rank the commercials of Super Bowl 46.  The poll was run online and voting was open to anyone with a facebook page.  Voters were able to score a video on a scale of one to five stars.  Way back when the 2011/2012 installment of the CTSB contest was launched, Doritos said that they would be giving out bonus prizes to any CTSB ad that landed in the top three of either USA Today ad meter poll.  (one million dollars for first, $600K for second, $400K for third)  Voting in the online ad meter ended last night and when all was said and done, Kevin Willson’s Crash the Super Bowl ad, “Sling Baby,” managed to come out on top.

So this year, Fritolay gets to boast that Doritos commercials took the #1 spot in both of USA Today’s ad meter polls.  But the new facebook ad meter poll is set up and run in such a way that virtually guarantees that a Crash the Super Bowl ad will land “in the money.”  The other 55 ads in the poll have nothing to gain financially by doing well so only the Sling Baby team seriously FOUGHT for first place.  So I think fritolay knew a Doritos ad would probably win the facebook poll all along.  However, I don’t think they ever could have guessed that the final score would be so lopsided that the results would make the entire facebook ad meter look like an unfair, illegitimate joke.  Check this out; here’s a shot of the Facebook ad meter scores as they were just a few hours after the Super Bowl ended:

Online ad meter standings: Sunday Night

On Sunday night, the CTSB commercial that won the traditional ad meter was also winning the online poll.  Actually, the top 5 ads on this poll are just a jumbled version of the results of the traditional ad meter.  So before the Sling Baby crew started voting, the facebook poll was actually a pretty fair indicator of how “the public” felt about the ads that aired during the big game.  But here’s what the scores looked like by Monday afternoon.

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Sing Baby had shot into first place but that was no surprise. However, the plummeting scores of the other videos in the top five were a little suspicious.  Also that Kia ad came out of nowhere so it’s possible that Kia was also trying and hoping to win the ad meter.  If that was the case, their hope didn’t last too long.  I guess the Sling Baby team decided they had to shut Kia down for good.  Here’s how the rankings looked at 1:15 on Tuesday afternoon:

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Just 20 minutes after I took that screen shot I checked the rankings again. The Kia ad’s score was down to 4.22 and it had fallen out of the top 5.  So the only commercial that seemed to actually be trying to beat Sling Baby was mysteriously crushed in the voting over night.

Here now are the final scores of USA Today’s Facebook Ad Meter Poll:

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When voting started, Sling Baby was in a three way tie for first place with Man’s Best Friend and Bud Light’s Weego.  But after two days of voting, Sling Baby wound up absolutely slaughtering the competition.  Though I use the word “competition” lightly.  I did see a few casual requests for votes from some of the other competitors, but I think most companies realized that an online ad meter was sort of meaningless.  For the Sling Baby team, winning a 56-way contest that almost no one else was really trying to win should have been a piece of cake.  And Doritos even helped their cause.  After Man’s Best Friend won the big ad meter contest on sunday, Doritos started encouraging their fans to head to the online poll and vote for Kevin Willson’s Sling Baby.  I think it’s insanely, amazingly awesome that the folks at Fritolay want to give one of their CTSB winners a million dollars.  Sure, it’s good publicity for them but still, it was a really gracious move.  With Doritos’ support, Kevin Willson and his teammates could have scored a spot in the Top 3 without breaking a sweat.  But unfortunately, winning $600,000 or $400,000 fair and square apparently wasn’t good enough for these folks.  I kept track of the ad meter for the last three days and it seems that Sling Baby won because a small army of supporters sabotaged the scores of the other ads in the poll by maliciously rating them 1 star out of a possible 5.

If you look at Sling Bab’s official facebook page, you’ll only see a few subtle hints that the team wanted people to down-vote the other ads in the poll.  Here’s one example I saw:

Screenshot of the "Vote For Sling Baby" facebook page

Just for the record, Willson’s “User Generated ad” was created by a team of more than 40 pro and semi-pro filmmakers and cost almost $3,000 to produce. But anyway, as you can see, whoever was running that facebook page was really pushing the idea that their team had to beat Budweiser, M&Ms, Kia, etc.  And one fan even flat out said he was rating the other videos one-star.  And yet, no one spoke up and said “Hey man, we don’t want to win that way.  Please only give honest scores.”

But that was how thing’s went down on Sling Baby’s official page.  Behind the scenes, the Sling Baby team felt free to get ruthless.  Based on what I have seen, it seems that some team members decided they could only win if they played dirty.  The creators of Sling Baby were incredibly organized and they even had someone managing their online campaigns.  That person’s name is Nate Daniels and the “About Us” section of Vote4SlingBaby.com lists him as being in charge of “Social Media.”  But apparently he also helped come up with the idea for the entry.  Daniels did an interview with something called the Lansing City Pulse in which he talked about his role on the team:

Daniels, who moved to Los Angeles, teamed up with the director of the ad, Kevin Wilson, to create the commercial. “I helped create the idea for ‘Sling Baby,’ and am in charge of the online campaign and the website,” Daniels said.

And here he is doing a TV interview with a Lansing, MI news station about Sling Baby’s quest to win the facebook ad meter.  So Daniels was a key member of the Sling Baby team.  He was literally the guy in charge of spreading the word about the ad and I assume that he was the head of the “online campaign” to get votes for the commercial.  At first Daniels simply asked people to vote for his team’s ad.  But as the Sling Baby slipped in the polls, he started to hint that people should give bad scores to the competition:

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But soon enough, Daniels dropped the innuendo and just started instructing people to rate the competing ads “1 star.”  In an absolutely despicable move, he even told told people to give a bad score to the other Doritos commercial, Man’s Best Friend:

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Daniels was by no means the only person trying to get Sling Baby fans to give bad scores to the other commercials in the ad meter. But those people weren’t in charge of the Sling Baby team’s social media campaigns so I’m not going to repost their comments.  I’m only sharing what Nate Daniels did because it was his job to promote Sling Baby online.

Now, if you’re thinking that perhaps this one team member went rogue and did all this without the OK of his teammates….well, take a look at this:

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Jeff Edwards was the Executive Producer of Sling Baby.  Not only that, Edwards was Kevin Willson’s “plus one” for the trip to the Super Bowl.  So Edwards was practically a co-finalist.  He got a free trip to beautiful Indianapolis, he got to watch the Super Bowl from Fritolay’s private box and I’m going to guess that he stands to receive a huge slice of the million dollar ad meter prize.  So this guy should have known better than to publicly call on people to give bad scores to the Bud Light, Kia and Chrysler ads. As Captain Hook would say, that’s just bad form.

Over the years I have been in a lot of video contests where votes determine the winners.  And I always make it a point to tell my family and friends NOT to down-vote the competition.  That just seems like a skeezy and unfair way to win a contest.  So it simply blows my mind that (as far as I saw) not one Sling Baby team member responded to Daniels or Edwards by saying, “Dude, chill out…we want to win fair and square.“  Though I didn’t see any evidence that Kevin Willson was asking people to sabotage the scores of the other videos in the contest, I think it’s incredibly unlikely that he didn’t know what his friends and teammates were up to.  And yet, it looks like he did nothing to stop these sad, unsportsmanlike tactics.

And that might be because he knew those tactics would work. Just look at how the scores for the other top videos tumbled during the voting.  Even Man’s Best Friend, the REAL best commercial of Super Bowl 46 went from first place to sixth place in just 48 hours.  That just shows you how effective “down-voting” can be.  Every high school graduate knows that you can get an A+ on every test but just one F per semester will wreck your final grade.  My point is that negative scores have a much bigger impact than positive scores do.  Let’s do some quick math:  Imagine a commercial on the ad meter had 10 votes of 4 stars each.  That would make their score 4.00.  If a person casts an 11th vote of 5 stars, the video’s score goes up to 4.09.  But if that person casts an 11th vote of 1 star, that video’s score plummets to 3.72.  Winning by down-voting the competition was probably easy but it was also certainly wrong.  But I guess the promise of a million god damn dollars can make people do some pretty crooked things.  To me it looks like some members of the Sling Baby team decided that it was their mission to make sure Willson’s commercial came in first by any means necessary.  And those folks straight up accomplished the hell out of that mission.

Right about now you might be wondering, “What’s the big deal?  So these guys did what it took to win a million bucks…what do you care?  It’s not your money.”  Well the reason this is a big deal because the Sling Baby crew completely violated the spirit of this competition.  I could win a hundred yard dash if my friends ran onto the track and tackled all the other runners, but that wouldn’t prove that I was the fastest guy in the race.  And I sure as hell wouldn’t be proud if someone gave me a gold medal for my phony baloney victory.  The point of the ad meter poll is to be ranked the best because your commercial IS the best….not because you got a whole bunch of people to give bad scores to the other ads.  Not only is that unsportsmanlike, I think it borders on fraud.  If the Sling Baby team launched a coordinated effort to get hundreds of people to LIE so that they could win this contest then they could be facing some serious legal repercussions.  And yes, when those voters gave bad scores to all the other videos in the contest they were LYING….they were not scoring the other commercials honestly.  I think this whole debacle could and should be investigated by the legal departments of Fritolay, USA Today, Kia, Budweiser, M&Ms, etc, etc, etc.  But at the very least, the down-voting could result in Sling Baby being completely disqualified from the Crash the Super Bowl contest.  Here’s what the official rules of the contest say about unsportsmanlike conduct:

Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to disqualify any individual deemed to be (a) tampering or attempting to tamper with the entry process or the operation of the Contest or any Sponsor or Contest-related Web Site; (b) violating the Official Rules; (c) violating the Web Site terms of service, conditions of use and/or applicable general rules or guidelines; or (d) acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner, or with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any other person. This Contest is offered only in the United States and is governed by the laws of the state of Texas. All claims relating in any manner to this Contest or to any Submission must be resolved in the federal or state courts located in Collin County, Texas.

Now that I think about it, if key members of the Sling Baby team were willing to resort to such unscrupulous measures to win the million dollar ad meter prize, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect that maybe they did some unscrupulous things to get enough votes to ensure their ad would air during the Super Bowl.  Again, I think that’s something the big wigs at Fritolay can and should look into.

Finally, there is one more reason why all this matters:  Crowdsourcing, video contests and consumer generated ads already don’t get a lot of respect from the pros in the advertising world.  Every time a twenty dollar, homemade commercial like “Man’s Best Friend” beats Madison Avenue’s multi-million dollar commercials, the entire ad industry looks bad.  But Sling Baby’s “win” on the facebook ad meter gives the pros a reason to dismiss the accomplishments of crowdsourcers everywhere.  Sling Baby makes it look like we can only win when we’re playing with a stacked deck.  And even worse, the ridiculous results of the facebook ad meter make all of us look like greedy, vindictive cheaters.  Oh, but just for the record, down-voting the other ads technically wasn’t cheating since their were no rules and the ad meter wasn’t even an actual “contest.”  But if people were giving bad scores to the other commercials on the ad meter just to help Sling Baby win, that would be unethical.  And winning a million dollars unethically is nothing to be proud of.
 

 
One final note:  The website AdBowl.com also ran an online poll where the public could rate the commercials of Super Bowl 46.  There were no prizes or bragging rights at stake in that poll so no one tried to sway the outcome of that contest.  According to people of the Internet, the two best commercials of the game were Volkswagen’s Dog Strikes Back and Doritos’ Man’s Best Friend.  As for Sling Baby, it came in 6th.
 

Now that I think about it, this commercial might actually have a decent shot of scoring well on the USA Today ad meter.  It’s very likable and the comedy keeps building and building so I bet it will get a really high score.  Wouldn’t it be funny if this consumer-made spot beat out all of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl ads??

Besides the top winner, Chevy gave out a ton of prizes to finalists in different regions of the globe.  Actually, they wound up awarding even more prizes than promised.  You can see the full list of winners on Mofilm’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MOFILM

First Place Winner.  Prize:  $10,000:

Pretty good huh?  Looks really professional too.  I was keeping an eye on this contest because I actually entered this one myself.  I collaborated with my long-distance contest buddy HappyJoel Levinson; he created a song and I shot and edited a video for it.  We did manage to win a prize; $500.  But this was one of those times when I kind of knew I had missed the mark.  I think the video was cute but it was lacking pizazz.  You can’t tell from the video but the outside stuff was shot in the freezing rain.  But at least the shoot was a good excuse to try out my new camera gear.  I just bought an HVX200 last month and I’m really happy with it.  Now that I’m using a real video camera again I realize just how inhibiting DSLRs can be.  With the HVX I don’t need to worry about ISO numbers or syncing up audio in post or stuff going out of focus if I move the camera a foot closer to the subject.  I’m excited to shoot a lot more entries this year now that I don’t have to worry so much about the tech side of things.  Basically I’ll be able to just point and shoot.  Anywho, if you’d like to see the entry Joel and I did (or the rest of the winning spots) head here:  http://tongal.com/project/aceservice

Kyle battles a Doritos-loving kid in his 2012 Crash the Super Bowl entry, Switcheroo

When it was announced the Pepsi Max wasn’t going to be a part of this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest I was both disappointed and relived; disappointed because that meant there would be only 5 finalist slots instead of 10 and relived because the folks at Pepsi simply did not seem to get this contest.  The people at Doritos who created and run “The Crash” have spent years building up the reputation of this mega-contest and in one season, the Pepsi Max team came in and did serious damage to the CTSB “brand.”

Pepsi Max hurt the contest in a few ways but it all comes down to which videos they picked for the Top 5.  When the 2010/2011 contest was announced, the Pepsi team kept pushing the idea that Pepsi Max was a “manly” diet drink.  And so, hundreds of filmmakers shot ads that were aimed at selling Pepsi Max to men.  But somewhere along the way, Pepsi must have changed their marketing strategy for Pepsi Max.  Because when they announced their finalists, 4 of the top 5 videos were clearly aimed at selling Pepsi Max to women.  That upset quite a few people.  But that was nothing compared to the backlash when fans actually watched Pepsi Max’s finalist choices.  Two of them were embarrassingly bad and a third ad was very-expensive looking but it wasn’t especially funny. It aired during the big game and scored 24th on the USA Today Ad Meter…which I believe makes it the worst performing CTSB ad ever.

So Pepsi’s Top 5 were just not on par with the kind of ads that Doritos always picked. There were only two 2011 Pepsi Max Crash the Super Bowl finalists that I personally liked.  One was “Love Hurts” and the other was this ad entitled, First Date:
 

 
One thing the Pepsi Judges did that kind of impressed me was that they weren’t afraid to pick ads that didn’t have high-end production values. (Of course, I think this strategy backfired in one or two cases) First Date doesn’t look super slick and it wasn’t shot with a $18,000 Red Camera.  The thing it has going for it is great writing.  It’s clever and interesting and it’s aimed at both women AND men.  And best of all, it’s TRUE.  People connect with this idea because they have probably been in situations like the one depicted in the video. First Date wound up airing during the Super Bowl and despite the fact that this ad only cost about $25 to make, it was ranked the #7 best ad of the night on the USA Today ad meter poll.  It just goes to show you that good writing conquers all.

The man behind First Date is named Kyle Stafford and he plays “the guy” in the commercial.  It turns out that Kyle is a fan of VCN and he graciously agreed to answer some questions about his Crash the Super Bowl experiences.  And now, on with the interview:
 
VCN:  So Kyle, tell us about yourself.  Where are you from?  What do you do for a living?
 
KYLE:  I am from Northern California. A place called Rohnert Park, north of San Francisco. I graduated from UC Santa Barbara and came straight to LA to become a world famous writer/producer. Ten years later and I am now an Editor over at Warner Brothers. It’s actually not a bad gig, but I still write/produce on nights and weekends.. I am married and we have 2 sons. And they are actually all in this years CTSB commercial.
 
VCN:  Do you enter a lot of video contests?
 
KYLE:  This year will be out 4th year entering the Crash contest. Last year we actually made 3 commercials, 2 for Pepsi Max and 1 for Doritos. But besides this contest, we don’t really enter other contests.
 
VCN:  Do you remember why you entered the contest last year?
 
KYLE:  We actually were not going to enter last year, because we had entered the 2 previous years and thought we had pretty good entries and never got in, so we were all stubborn, like “screw it” we don’t need them.  Then we came to our senses and realized we did need them and we ended up making 3 spots. We actually thought a different entry was going to be the finalist. A spot called Pepsi Wedding, which you had in your Top 30 list. So when they called and said it was for First Date we were all kind of shocked.
 
VCN:  Tell us about how you created First Date.
 
KYLE:  A couple of friends and I have a comedy/skit website called GoodLookingLiars.com, so we had been making content on and off together for about 2 years when we decided to enter the contest again. We hadn’t really put any thought into the commercials since we were not going to enter anything, but then when we decided to enter, we had almost no time, so we had to act quick. I got the idea in LA traffic, during an especially awful stretch on the 405. I just remember it making me laugh, so I called Nick Simotas and Robby Wells right away and told them the idea and they both laughed. Then I called my wife and she said there was no way we could say that during the Super Bowl. That’s when I knew we were going to make it. The ad cost about 25 dollars to make. We got the restaurant for free, got friends to be extras and shot the whole thing in about an hour. It isn’t the most complex commercial in the world, with no production audio and really only 3 camera angles. The 25 dollars was just to buy frozen dinners to put food on the plates as well as a pack of gum so the whole cast and crew could partake in a good chew. The actress opposite me is Julia Bellows, she is a super funny friend of ours that we have used in a bunch of our stuff.
 
VCN:  How and when did you find out that you made the 2011 finals?
 
KYLE: The people at Pepsi called us about 3 or 4 days before they posted the results…. The only reason they tell you in advance is to make sure you have all the correct actor/location releases and paperwork before they go through the process of making you a finalist. I was actually at work when they called, and we were not allowed to tell anyone until they posted, so I had to sit at work the rest of the day with this huge dopey grin on my face and I couldn’t tell anyone why.
 
VCN:  Did Pepsi Max ask you to keep the news to yourself?  How did your friends and family react when they heard the news?
 
KYLE:  Yeah, we were asked to keep the news under wraps until they posted the finalists. I think my friends and family thought I was kidding, most probably did until the second they saw it actually air during the game. Good thing my face was on it or nobody would have ever believed me.
 
VCN:  How was your trip to the Super Bowl?
 
KYLE:  Trip to the Super Bowl was amazing, we got to sit in a luxury box at the 40 yard line with catering and free booze. Dallas was freezing though, Pepsi had actually planned a bunch of cool events and parties to go to, but we had to cancel a good amount because it was really hard to get around, but we got to go to the Pepsi Jam concert thing with Kid Rock and Duran Duran. So the whole trip was pretty surreal, being whisked away to events and having VIP passes. Usually I am working catering at those things, so it was cool to sit back and enjoy it all.
 
VCN:  Your commercial wound up playing very late in the game.  How did it feel when it finally ran?
 
KYLE:  Yeah, they don’t tell you if you’re going to air until you see it on the TV, so every commercial break is pretty intense. They aired 5 of the 6 ads in the first quarter, so only one ad was going to air the rest of the game, so then we had to sit through every commercial break until about the middle of the 4th quarter. They actually ended up airing our ad on the Dallas Stadium jumbo-tron, which is the biggest jumbo-tron in the world I think, so my already giant head was spread out over a 60 yard TV. We actually thought at that point our ad was not going to air on TV, thinking the Jumbo-tron was a consolation prize or something. But then the time came and it aired and Nick and I freaked out and hugged, it was a pretty cool moment. I think Nick had a roll of quarters in his pocket.
 
VCN:  First Date did amazingly well on the ad meter.  In came in 7^th.  Did you expect to rank so high?  Even though you didn’t “land in the money” were you happy with how your commercial performed?
 
KYLE:  The ad did a lot better then we thought it would. We didn’t expect it to rank so high, but I think in the sea of slick over-produced ads, I think we were kind of novel in that our ad was so insanely simple and true. The biggest thing we kept hearing was how true our ad was and I think people were laughing at the truth of the guy/girl thing. It’s funny, landing in the money was never even a thought for us, we just wanted it to air, then when we saw we came so close, you start thinking “Damn! We almost got like 400 grand.” and you start to get bummed, but then we shook ourselves and remembered we were at the Superbowl and had an ad that we created that just aired in front of 110 million people and we perked up. And Nick said he had a roll of dimes now.
 
VCN:  Were you surprised that Pepsi Max wasn’t part of the Crash the Super Bowl contest this year?
 
KYLE:  Yeah I was surprised, if you look back at last year, Pepsi had 2 of the top 7 ads on the Ad Meter. If you were a real ad agency and you could point to those kind of results they would be getting bonuses, but I am sure the people at Pepsi Max know a little more than I do about soda marketing, so I am sure they have their reasons.  But it sucks having the finalists basically cut into half. Makes it that much harder to win.
 
VCN:  How did making the CTSB finals change your life?
 
KYLE:  Being a finalist in CTSB was a super cool experience, but I wouldn’t say it has changed my life.  It is a really nice story to tell and legitimizes us a little with Hollywood producer types, but nobody is knocking down our door for all our content. I got recognized a little right afterward, a few people asked me if I was that guy on TV or I would be at the store and you would see someone staring at me like they knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite figure out from where. I had a kid want a picture with me at the game. I told him “When you go back through these pictures you are gonna be like ‘Who the hell is this guy in my photo album?”
 
VCN: Did you enter the contest again this year? 
 
Yeah, we entered in again this year. I included my whole family in this year’s ad. You can tell we broke the bank again on this ad. This one actually didn’t cost anything:
 
http://www.crashthesuperbowl.com/#/gallery?video=13134
 
Thanks for your site and good luck to all the entrants. Keep making stuff!!!!
 
VCN:  And thank you for your time.  Good Luck this year!

A somewhat humorous banner

Last week, the new video contest hosting site Highly Humorous launched their third ever contest so I thought I’d take a second and do a quick update on their progress.  It’s really interesting to watch a new site like this as it evolves.  Right now, HH is just running small contests of their own so they can develop a strong talent base before they start running contests for outside companies.  I’m not sure if they came up with that idea on their own but I know that Poptent started the same way.  I looked at some of the first assignments that site ever ran and they were stuff like “make an ad for a fictional cell phone company!”

Highly Humorous’ newest contest is also for a fictional company; 48 Hour Energy.  That’s an energy drink that keeps you wired for two days straight.  I like these test contests because filmmakers are allowed to be irreverent and kind of crazy since there’s no actual sponsor to offend.  The deadline to enter the 48 Hour Energy contest is December 22nd and the top prize is $1,000.  More info here.

Highly Humorous also recently announced the winners of the “SuperHero” test contest and you can see all the results here.  There were some decent entries but I think my favorite was this video that came in third:

Click to view.

I’m not sure how much longer HH plans to do these “test” contests but I’ve been talking to some of the guys running the site and they seem to have some big plans for 2012.  I don’t think this is officially official but it seems like soon HH will be running contests for outside companies where the prizes will be in the $5,000.  So, HH will be a site to keep an eye on in the new year.

Drink me.

Well, I did it.  I finally, freaking did it.  I have slain my white whale!  I was finally able to win a video contest where the winner was determined by facebook votes.  After getting my ass kicked in these contests all year, I started to become obsessed with winning one of them.  I was always able to make a video good enough to get into the finals but I could never muster enough votes to come out on top.  After a while, I realized that there were certain people who kept winning these facebook votes over and over and over.  So I basically stalked them across the web to figure out what they were doing.  These people basically work around the clock to get hundreds of votes a day. And let me tell you, by observing them in action I was able to learn some crazy techniques for getting real facebook votes.  But I’m still a novice. I lucked out and none of the super-vote-getters out there entered the Sledgehammer contest….maybe because it was only open to residents of a handful of Midwestern states.  Seriously, that restriction was one reason I entered this one.  I thought it would cut back on the competition and it sure did.

The contest I managed to win was Sledgehammer Wine’s “Pumpkin Crush” contest.  The idea for this one was elegantly simple; contestants were supposed to make a funny video of themselves destroying a pumpkin.  Why?  Well, I guess because the company’s name is “Sledgehammer” and it was October.  Here’s my entry:

Grand Prize Winner.  Prize:  $2,000:
 

 
I think that was pretty good.  And if the winner had been picked by a panel of judge’s I think I still would have won the grand prize.  But let me be clear about something; winning one of these facebook voting contests isn’t really anything to be proud of.  Yeah I did make a video that was able to get into the top 10 but that wasn’t too tough.  These facebook contests aren’t about skill.  They’re just a competition to see who can get the most new people to “like” the sponsor’s page.  So now that I’ve finally proved to myself that I can win one of these, I think I’ll be taking a break for a while and focus on contests that require a little talent to win.