2009 November | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

Avoid like the plague: DocSniper.com

Posted by Dan L. on November 27th, 2009

NOTE: Our traffic has gone up a good bit thanks to the Crash the Superbowl posts. So if you’re new to the site, thanks for visiting. If you’re looking for a place to promote your Doritos commercial, scroll down to the next post. But if you feel like reading some non-CTSB video contest news, scroll your eyes down to the next paragraph.

There are lot of reasons NOT to enter certain video contests. If the winner is picked by a public vote, you should probably stay out of that fight. If the prize is really small that means the company is cheap and might not even pay up if you win. But the most offensive red flag is a contest that charges you an entry fee. All I can say about that is Fuuuuu*k that noise. Finally, I try to avoid contests that are run by non-U.S. based companies. For one, those contests are usually open to everyone, everywhere which means that your competition is THE ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD. But more importantly, if you have a problem with that contest, what are you going to do? Fly over to their home country and sue them?

So those are what I consider to be deal-breaking red flags. That said, I think I have officially discovered the WORST video contest I have ever seen. Somehow they managed to pull off the rare, 4-red-flagger contest here. It’s “Doc Sniper’s Make Some Noise Video contest” and it immediately comes off as suspicious because the point of the contest is incredibly vague. Check out this description:

That’s it? Make a video with music in it? What the heck is the point of that? Ohhh..I know. The point is that to enter the contest, you have to pay a $10 ENTRY FEE! Pretty much any filmmaker will already have some kind of project that includes music in it. So maybe a ton of them will decide to take a shot, pay the 10 bucks and enter to win the massive $500 jackpot!

This just has “scam” written all over it. The winner of the $500 prize is picked by the “Doc Sniper” community. So think about that; you have to PAY to enter the contest and then if you want the prize, you have to get a bunch of people to register to the site to vote for you. I repeat, Fuuuuuuu*k that noise.

I kind of feel bad for ripping on DocSniper.com because after looking through the site, it seems to be the passion project of some young entrepreneurs hoping to build a new social networking site. I don’t think they actually want to rip people off but based on the business model they are presenting, I think that it’s inevitable that people are going to get screwed. Basically it looks like they are trying to build a pyramid scheme for video contests; if 100 people each pay 10 bucks to enter the contest then 50% of that money goes to the “winner” and 50% goes to Doc Sniper. According to the site, it is their goal to do one contest like this every month. But so far, just 3 people have entered the “music” contest. Are they still going to pay out the 500 bucks if they only take in $30 in entries fees?

The final red flag here is a little weird but there are several videos on the site from “Doc Sniper” himself in which he explains certain aspects of the site. Click right here to visit the site and watch one of these videos. (best example is on the front page in the upper right hand corner) Something is weird about Doc Sniper. It took me a second to catch on but the guy in the video is doing a fake American Accent. I kept poking through the site and in the forum, someone mentions that Doc Sniper is based in Australia. So there you go, the final red flag. And this red flag is so scary it has a picture of an even redder flag on it! The people behind this site are going out of their way to make it appear like they are based in the US (besides the accent, they seem to really drive home the fact that prizes are paid in US dollars.)

Like I said, I feel bad for coming down so hard on this site. Despite the weird fake accent, “Doc Sniper” even seems like a nice guy. So Doc, if you have a google alert set for your name and you see this, I recommend that you drop the entry fee idea ASAP. There are just way, way too many free video contests out there for the concept ever to catch on.

Help Beardy find the best of the CTSB entries!

Posted by Dan L. on November 23rd, 2009

Beardy is a dreamer of big dreams. And Beardy’s latest big dream was to watch all 4047 entries in this year’s crash the superbowl contest and list his predictions for which commercials would make it to the finals. But alas, this was a pipe dream. For if one were to actually sit down and watch every, single entry that was submitted to the Doritos contest this year they’d be stuck in front of a computer for almost three full days. Beardy still wants to compile a list of predictions, but he could use some help.

So, have you seen a spot that you thought was especially awesome? Did you see one that you know is destined to make it to the finals? Or did you create an amazing commercial that you think should be recognized? Or did you make a spot was just OK but you feel like doing some shameless self promotion? If you answered in the affirmative to any of these questions, let us know. Send us a link to your favorite CTSB entries at or just leave it in a comment. In the next few days, I’ll edit this post and insert links to some of the more interesting suggestions I’ve received.

A tale of two caskets (full of doritos)

Posted by Dan on November 19th, 2009

FEBRUARY 8th, 2010 UPDATE: In the post below I explain that I suspect that my Casket-full-of-Doritos idea for the Crash the Superbowl contest might have been stolen by another team of filmmakers. Well, the suspicious entry, “Casket” went on to score a spot in the finals and last night it aired during the Superbowl. Since I first wrote this post I’ve learned a lot about the other entry and I am more convinced than ever that I was plagiarized. For a more up to date version of this story, click here: https://videocontestnews.com/2010/02/08/dueling-caskets-full-of-doritos/

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Beardy is camping out to buy tickets for tonight’s 12:01AM screening of Twilight so while he’s away I thought I’d step in and do a little self-promotion. I also wanted to share my Doritos hard luck story. Like pretty much anybody reading this site, I submitted an entry for this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest. And here is that very entry now!

Be honest, it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever seen right? I’m super proud of my submission but I know that the competition out there is tough. And I was totally ok with the fact that with thousands of entries coming in, 6 teams of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and Red cameras and fancy dollies would probably come along and take all the finalist spots. And like I said, I was totally cool with that. But then….I saw this:

Ahhhhh! Some team of professional filmmakers with deep pockets and a Red camera and a fancy dolly came along and filmed an idea a whole lot like mine! Man, that’s a bummer. The coincidences between that spot and mine are just crazy, aren’t they? When 4000 people each try and come up with an idea for a commercial for the same product there’s obviously going to be some overlap, but damn, there’s a lot of overlap here. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of CTSB entries that have really similar ideas. (For instance, how many Doritos-as-a-paper-football and dorito-loving-zombies spots have you watched in the last few weeks?) But of the 2200 or so Crash entries I’ve watched, I don’t think there are two of them that share more common elements than these two casket-full-of-doritos entries. I mean, it’s not just that both videos are funeral scenes. It’s that both videos include:

1. A dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos
2. A funeral for that guy that turns out to be fake
3. A big, framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket
4. Shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips
5. A climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over

That’s sort of a lot of similarities to squeeze into 30 seconds, isn’t it? I have to wonder, what the heck happened here? Is this just a case of really bad luck or is the CIA monitoring my brainwaves as part of some kind of scheme to control the masses via secret messages hidden in a superbowl commercial? There’s no chance that another team of filmmakers were somehow (gulp) inspired by my entry, is there?

My entry, Rest in Chips was uploaded on Friday, November 6th and the other video, The Casket, appeared online a few days later. I might be paranoid but I’m not crazy enough to think that the makers of the other entry saw Rest In Chips and then ran out the next day and rented a church so they could make their own version of my spot. So I was left with only one conclusion; this was just a giant coincidence…nothing more.

But then it finally hit me; I am an idiot. After I wrote my script I created and animated storyboard so I could see if I could fit my entire idea into 30 seconds. On October 6th, I . Then I sent the link to a few people and asked for ideas and feedback. During that time, the video was set to “public” and could be seen by anyone. One of my friends even said to me “why did you put that on youtube? What if someone steals your idea!?” And I laughed and laughed at that notion. And then I stopped laughing because I realized I had made a very stupid mistake. I named the video “Doritos Storyboard.” Because the word “Doritos” was in the title, any CTSB contestant who went to youtube to study last year’s winning entries or actual Doritos commercials could have found and watched my storyboard.

I’ve been burned by plagiarism before so I went back to youtube and deleted the storyboard. But by then it had already been up for like a week. A few days later, I changed some of the dialogue in my script and created a slightly tweaked version of the animated storyboard. On October 12th I uploaded that video to youtube except I named this one simply “dortest” so that it would be hidden from youtube’s search engine. . Here it is:

I hate to think the worst of people like this but if you think I’m going overboard, try a little experiment. Open The Casket in one window and video in the other. Then hit “Play” on them as fast as you can so you can watch them simultaneously. The shots line up better than Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. I can maybe understand that two separate filmmakers could come up with the same ideas, but what are the odds they’d use the same site gags at the same moments??

I really have no idea what to think about this. I know it’s just speculation on my part but I think I might have declare shenanigans on the makers of The Casket. At the very least, I think it’s plausible that somewhere out there, another filmmaker who was planning on entering the CTSB contest went on to youtube and searched for “Dortios” related videos. If they “Sorted by date,” my storyboard would have been right up in their face. The storyboard seems too crazy to ever shoot (seriously, what kind of a nut would get a real casket and have a real grave dug?) so maybe they assumed it would never really be filmed and so the concept was fair game.

Or maybe it was the CIA. I dunno. At this point I’m pretty open to any possibilities.

1/6/2010 UPDATE: Well, Doritos announced their Top 6 finalists on Monday and I was extremely disappointed to see that “The Casket” made the cut. For making the top 6 they receive $25,000, a trip to the superbowl and a chance to see their ad air during the game. If their ad does air, they could win a bonus of up to 2 million dollars.

After writing this blog post I contacted Doritos and informed them of my plagiarism concerns and explained the situation. I received a response saying that the Doritos legal team would look into the matter.

So even though the company’s lawyers knew there might be a chance the idea was stolen the judges decided to choose it anyway. Since 40% of a video’s score was based on “originality” I cannot understand how “The Casket” could have gotten a high enough score to make the Top 6. There were 4000 entries. Common sense tells you that a fair judging system would yield many videos that were just fractions of a point away from making the top 6. So a serious deduction in any category should theoretically sink any videos chances.

Now that Doritos has chosen “Casket” as a finalist, a new and even bigger problem has presented itself. Even if the idea was not stolen from me, “Casket” should have been disqualified because it infringes on my copyright. Copyright infringement can happen on accident but that does not give the infringer a free pass to benefit from their actions. Unintentional copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. My storyboard animation for “Rest in Chips” was first posted to the web the first week in October. The version that is on youtube now was uploaded October 12th. On October 29th I posted the first rough cut of my entry to my youtube channel. It, and several other rough cuts are still there. That first rough cut was on line 4 days before “Casket” was even filmed. And finally, my entry was uploaded to the contest site well before “Casket” was.

This all means that I am the owner and creator of the “Dead man has his last wish to be buried in chips fulfilled but during the funeral he is revealed to be alive inside the casket full of chips that gets knocked over” story idea. If a commercial was running on TV right now that was as similar to “Casket” as my entry, storyboard and rough cuts are, the judges would never have been able to select “Casket” as a finalist because Doritos would be sued for IP theft and copyright infringement regardless of whether or not the concept was intentionally stolen. My rights as an independent filmmaker are the same as a multi-million dollar corporation. Just because my storyboard or entry have not aired on TV, it does not mean my Intellectual Property rights don’t count.

Since Doritos knew that I was concerned about plagiarism and since they knew that I have proof that I was the first person to publicly release this idea, I feel personally offended that they chose to ignore my rights and concerns. Back in the newspaper days, they used to say “never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink buy the barrel.” Let’s update that statement for the modern age and say that you should “never pick a fight with a filmmaker who has a blog and nothing to lose.”

More details about these new developments here: https://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/04/one-of-the-crash-the-superbowl-finalists-revealed-early/ and here: https://videocontestnews.com/2010/01/05/doritos-2010-crash-the-superbowl-finalists/

‘My Chipotle’ winners from like 2 months ago

Posted by Dan L. on November 18th, 2009

Here’s a bit of advice you would do well to heed; never enter a video contest that is being advertised on a billboard. If you’re serious about winning contests, avoid the high-profile stuff and concentrate on winning the contests that only 9 people enter.

As much as I love Chipotle, I knew I should resist the temptation to enter their “My Chipotle” video contest since they’d probably recived thousands of entries. (they did) To enter the contest you were supposed to create a video explaining what your personal, favorite taco or burrito is. (Mine: Chicken burrito with black beans, medium hot salsa, rice, cheese and a smidge of sour cream.) The winners of the contest were announced like 2 months ago but since I actually considered entering this one, I was curious to see who eventually won. And here’s who did. First place was $10,000: /#/view_submission/63673

I ‘d embed the video but it wants to just start playing on its own. I hate when websites do that so I won’t do it to you. Another musical entry took second prize which was $5,000 and a Chipotle party for 50 people. Wowza. /#/view_submission/63773

I sort of love the first place winning video a lot. But the second place video is yet another Andy Sandburg comedy-rap rip off. There seems to be one of those in every big-money video contest. This one is especially annoying thanks to the creepy kid doing the rapping.

Anyway, wow. I swear to God….I am going to try and get to a chipotle as soon as possible. I need a burrito, STAT.

A Dying Breed

Posted by Dan L. on November 17th, 2009

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.

Flavor Flaaaav!?

Posted by Dan L. on November 15th, 2009

I thought I’d give the posts about the Crash the Superbowl contest a break for a while but Doritos just added a new batch of last minute uploads. That brings the total number of entries to 4023. Yeesssh. That’s a lot. I pretty much have given up on watching them all but I have been browsing. And in my browsing I saw this spot that features the real Flavor Flav!

Is that insane or what? It was just a matter of time before someone tried to make the finals using a “celebrity,” I guess. But the above commercial is a huge waste of Flavor Flav! He’s just sitting there. It’s not funny or interesting and the Doritos don’t even get more than a few seconds of screen time. I imagine it’ll be a real turn off to the judges since it’s pretty obvious that the folks behind this entry assumed that having Flav would be enough to propel them to the finals. But I think if Doritos wanted Flavor Flav as a sponsor, they would have gone out and hired him on their own.

Oh, the entry is listed as being submitted by “FlavorFlav.” However, someone in the comment section states that Flav did not write or direct the spot. He says that “two 25 year olds from Los Angeles, Matthew and Marthinus,” created the commercial. If Flavor Flav HAD actually made this entry himself it’d be many times more interesting to me.

UPDATE: The New York Post covered Flav’s entry into the CTSB contest and they imply that Flav himself created the commercial. They even got a response about the entry from someone at Doritos. Here’s the entire blurb from the Post:

Flavor Flav must be hard-up for cash. We hear the VH1 reality show star and erstwhile rapper is trying his hand as a TV commercial director as part of Doritos’ annual “Crash the Super Bowl” ad contest, in which users are asked to submit their own ads to compete for a $1 million prize. “He did this totally randomly and unprovoked,” says a source at the company. “And it’s actually pretty damn good.”

This is an interesting story and it’s just the type of thing that shows like TMZ would love to cover because it includes good video they can use. I wouldn’t be surprised if Flav’s entry was on TV a few times this week. That’d be great for Doritos but not so great for the team that made the spot. Dortitos will get lots of free advertising but the entry will get over-exposed. Who would consider a commercial to be the best of the Superbowl if they already saw it on the news in November? Maybe Doritos should just buy it right now and start airing it. It wouldn’t just be a commercial then, it’d be a story worthy of some news coverage. I also read today that Flavor Flav is more than $180,000 behind in his taxes. Man, imagine the story if Doritos paid Flav’s tax bill in exchange for that commercial!

The WTF-were-they-thinking awards

Posted by Dan L. on November 13th, 2009

I didn’t keep a close eye on the Doritos Crash the Superbowl Contest last year and now I can’t find an exact number of entries received. I’ve seen the number “1,900” a few times but I’ve also read that there were around 2,200 entries. I’ve decided to just go the lazy route and say that in 2008, about 2000 people entered the Crash the Superbowl contest. Sound good?

As for this year, after a few days of processing time it looks like the final number of entries for the 2009/2010 installment of CTSB is 3923. My God….if right now you decided to watch every CTSB entry it would take you more than 32 straight hours of viewing to get through them all! Wow….to the good people at Doritos, all I can say is “Good Luck!”

At this point I’ve watched (when I saw “watched” I mean I clicked the play button and gave each video a chance before clicking “next”) 2200 or so entries but I still haven’t seen a hands down winner. There hasn’t been one entry that I’ve seen where I said “yes! That’s a finalist.”

However, there have been plenty of times where I watched a video and thought to myself “GOOD GOD, NO!!!” So for fun, I thought I’d post a few of those commercials that will never, ever, EVER win because they have some kind of horrible, freaky, disturbing flaw. Think of these as the winners of the WTF Were They Thinking awards:

This first spot is called “Creepy Doritos Man” and boy does it live up to its name. The parents of the kid who made this need to get him into some therapy right away.

The videos that make it to the finals won’t just be awesome videos. They will be videos that the maximum number of people would enjoy since Doritos’ goal is to have their commercials take all three top spots on the USA today Ad meter. So it amazes me that so many people entered incredibly gross videos. Who would ever turn a dial to indicate that they loved watching someone do something like this……

At least it was a really well produced spot. And so is this next one. This next video is actually awesome. I think it’s the work of an evil genius. It looks and sounds amazing but it is so dark and depressing it just has no chance.

This is kind of weird but I have noticed a lot of entries that incorpotae negative stereotypes about Hispanics. Specifically I’ve seen a lot of sombreros and heard a lot of really bad jose Jimenez-esque accents. Can you imagine the PC apocalypse that would occur if Doritos aired a commercial like this during the superbowl?

The WTF-were-they-thinking rating of this next video is off the charts. The message of this commercial is that Doritos will kill you dead and then explode out of your corpse.

Finally, here’s the commercial with the biggest WTF moment of them all. It’s subtle and it’s fast so watch carefully.

No it’s not the seagull poop that I think was a bad idea. It was the attempt to get a laugh using a photoshoped picture of the destroyed World Trade Center.

Perfection ain’t easy

Posted by Dan L. on November 11th, 2009

Image ganked from Time.com. In your face, Time!

The other day I was up way too early and I was watching the only thing on TV that wasn’t Yu-Gi-Oh or an infomercial; Morning Joe on MSNBC. Anyway, I’ve got it playing in the background while I’m on the computer (probably watching Doritos entries) when I notice that Kevin Spacey is a guest. So I turn up the volume and guess what he’s talking about? A video contest. Specifically, one of the biggest video contests of the year; The Stella Artois Film Project. But I just barely consider this one a video contest. It was really more of a short film competition. In my tiny mind, the only things that qualify this as a video contest are the facts that the films had to be submitted on-line and that there was a specific theme that each filmmaker needed to try and fulfill. The theme was “perfection” because as any hipster can tell you, Stella Artois is the perfect beer.

Kevin Spacey explained that a winner had finally been announced and that they had a big party to celebrate the night before. Here’s the winning entry by Jason Musante Klein. I can’t embed so click on the photo below to view it.

First Place. Prize: $50,000

All the finalists in this contest where super slick. Seriously, there were some major productions submitted. The judges were pretty top notch too. The winner was picked by Kevin Spacey, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lawrence Fishburn, James Blunt and Judy Dench. Seriously, holy Sh&*%, man. That’s an insane jury. Wowza. Those big names all probably agreed to participate because of Kevin Spacey. His company, TriggerStreet co-founded the competition with Stella Artois. TriggerStreet by the way is a really awesome company/website/concept thing he and producer Dana Brunetti created to help emerging talent sneak through the gates of the Hollywood system. It’s a great idea and the ‘A’ list celebrities who acted as judges this time around and the huge cash prize should tell you that TriggerStreet Films means business. Check out their website here: http://www.triggerstreet.com. Hmmm, Triggerstreet.com has a little box on it that flashes a “quote of the day.” Below is today’s quote. Could there possibly be a better motto to sum up what video contests are all about?

“Ability is of little account without opportunity.” – Napoleon Bonaparte