Have you seen those Coors Light where a bunch of “average” dudes ask football coaches goofy questions during post-game press conferences? Yes? Ok, well Coors wanted 6 more coach spots that they could air on Tivo so they turned to poptent. Coors provided the coach footage and interested filmmakers had to go out and shoot their own press conference scenes.
Today Poptent announced that Coors Light would be purchasing 6 user-created ads for $3,500 a piece. And guess what, one of those ads just happened to be made by your pal Beardy. Boosh! Here’s my spot “Blue Mountains” followed by two other selected submissions that I especially liked:
Ads purchased by Coors. Price: $3,500 each
The other three spots that Coors purchased can be seen here: http://www.poptent.net/blog/?p=1019
All the filmmakers whose ads were purchased really went all out. I can tell you from experience that getting a bunch of extras, some still cameras and several believable TV cameras together into a room that looks like it could be used for a post-game press conference isn’t easy. I shot my submission (and two other spots that didn’t get picked) in the TV studio of my old college. A few friends played extras but almost everyone on camera were actors hired via craigslist. Oh, but I recycled the Yeti from my non-winning careerbuilder entry! Glad he finally got his moment of glory.
NOTE: This post has inspired a pretty interesting discussion about payment amounts for video contests. So check out the comments to read the opinions of a variety of past contest winners.
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First of all, CONGRATULATIONS Beardy on a well executed spot. The comedy is gold. “How you doin’?”. Way to juxtapose the dialogue to get potent mileage out of such a pregnant opportunity. Your writing was great. Your casting was stellar. Props (Yeti especially) fantastic.I got only one problem Beardy.
You underpriced yourself.
I really don’t know the answer to a problem I see looming larger and larger with each new contest, but if this POPTENT transaction is any indication of the future of the ad industry, eventually, the brands are going to be regularly getting work like ours for $1,000.00 and $2,000.00 a POP (pun intended).
At this rate there will be no such thing as full time commercial directors. It will be a part time gig for everyone, even for the cream of the crop directors. We all will still have to go to work in our cubicle during the week while we chase what our wives will now justifiably call our ‘hobbies’.
I don’t mean to rain on anyones parade here, but I think if you follow it to it’s logical conclusion, my argument has merit. We should reserve our talent for those contests who respect what we are doing (bigger paydays). I mean Beardy, I counted the actors, extras, crew, resources, production costs and at $3,500.00 you would be hard pressed to pay everyone involved minimum wage after expenses. Even if you got some of the resources for free or as favors, sooner or later those favors need to be repaid, so they inevitably still are ‘costs’.
Look, I would probably accept the money too on a slow month when I need to pay the rent, but can you see how in the long run it will probably end up working against us? I mean, this kind of prize money barely pays the bills, and that’s only if we WIN EVERY CONTEST WE ENTER (which ain’t happening).
Talk to me. The VCK
Hey thanks jared. You make a very good point about the money issue. If Coors wanted to buy spots that they could actually air regularly, I think $3,500 would of course been too low. I’m not sure how it’s going to work but I think each ad will be shown once or maybe a few times on Tivo. (I don’t have tivo so I’m not sure when or how ads run) I think I actually sort of played it safe when it came to my budget. If the spots were meant for regular airings and the price tag was higher I would rented a nicer camera and hired a ton more extras. But I shot this relatively cheaply; I paid the actors a total of $300 I think and I’ll be giving 10% to the friend that acted as my DP and got us into the TV studio.
So that’s a pre-tax profit of $2850 for me. Assuming I put 30 hours of work total into my three submissions, that still means I made almost $100 per hour for my efforts. But the money is only part of what made me want to do this assignment. Poptent doesn’t run “video contests” so technically, Coors held an open call for commercials and they bought one of mine. So I can add Miller Coors to my client list. Plus, this is the closest I’ve gotten to getting paid to have my work air on TV. So in all, I think it’s a fair trade.
But I see what you’re saying about under-pricing ourselves. However, I think the trend will be heading in the opposite direction. I foresee paydays going up, not down. I think brands like Coors are just starting to dip their toes into the “user-generated” waters. I think open-calls like this, especially on poptent bode well for independent creatives. I first signed up for poptent maybe 6 months ago and in that time it’s seemed like filmmakers have been getting paid more and larger amounts. I think that if the members there continue to go all out then brands will be raising their prices and their expectations. I think brands like Coors will see what level of quality they can get for what price. For $3,500 they got some creative, but not especially slick commercials. If they had offered to buy 6 spots at $1,000 each, I would never have spent $650. And the main reason I felt comfortable spending that much was because most of the submissions I saw had budgets of under 20 bucks (A few cases of beer) I knew that if I went overboard, I might have a really decent shot. So if Coors were to run another open call, I think they’d want to see even better submissions and that means they’d have to raise their price.
Congratulations on getting purchased, Beardy! Your work was awesome, and we’re proud of it.
As for the discussion on ‘purchase price’ – we do our best to keep this number up – and yes, I hope the trend will be for this number to get bigger and bigger as this model becomes more accepted as a way to get creative made.
To Jared’s point – while we hope to keep ramping up the payouts, we’re not in this game for the quick one-off contest with a huge, splashy grand prize. I’m sure you guys are all aware that the Doritos contest got 4000+ entries. Who knows, maybe we’ll be running the Crash the SuperBowl contest next year.
@ Beardy:
If you are being honest that you only spent 10 hours per entry (script developement to submission) than you are a more efficient producer than most I know, including myself. I still contend that, considering you are not going to win every contest you enter, that you are still not keeping the lights on with paydays of this amount.
@ Mark Schoenveld
What’s up Mark, we haven’t chatted in a while. Good to talk with you again.
You def. got three very impressive spots for Coors. I think we all are fairly familiar with corporate logic, and there is no way Coors is looking at the results of this contest and saying “Damn, we blew it, I guess we need to pay more money next time…..”.
Yes, and I am glad the finalists are chosen by the brand and not a popularity vote like the average contest de jour. And yes, I admire and approve of what you are working towards at PopTent, but in the three years that I have known you to run your assignments (xlntads), $3,500.00 per spot does not indicate a steady climb of pay-outs. Somethings got to give, other wise my assertion/prediction of ‘part-time’ hobbyists is the inevitable future for even the best creatives.
And again, I will fall back on the plain hard facts of the matter that a creative (only if he is VERY VERY good), will still have to work on 10-15 contests for every one he wins. This is what I was referring to when I suggested Beardy is working for the minimum wage.
Hopefully and respecfully. Hope you boys both enjoy a prosperous new year.
The VCK
Guys, let me be clear here. I am not playing holier-than-thou. I would have accepted the pay-out too because except for Doritos (which I did not make finals on) the pickings are pretty slim these days for LEGIT contests where fraud isn’t rampant.
I will be entering the Louisianna Hot Sauce contest and it is only a $5,000.00 prize, and $2,500.00 2nd place prize…and that’s only for the two guys lucky enough to win. As a creative I will take whatever I get when it comes to the lean months that I have to feed the family. The problem is, these brands are smelling this desperation and it does not bode well for our future.
The VCK
Congrats Dan,
That was a good spot. Nicely done! To echo some of what Jared was saying: if this was some other company I might not have been surprised by the low contest money, but Coors!? I would have just expected them to have a bit bigger payouts.
With that said, I am probably going to start entering in more contests that have smaller prizes. Heck, a big contest with $100k like the LGfilmfest one I entered is giving me the run around anyways, so why not go for smaller ones?
Lucas
Congratulations Beardy, great spot. To Jared’s point, it does seem like contest sponsors can see the value in having hundreds (or thousands in the case of Doritos) of producers make the spots for them and pay them only a fraction of what it would cost to go through an established advertising agency. They also get the immediate buzz in a community that a traditional spot may not garner unless it really stood out and got passed around.But my question is are there producers out there who are counting on contest winnings as their sole income? I’m sure Mark may have some insight into that. I entered a few contests last year and made about $6000. It was fun and exciting and nice to have that extra money (especially last year) but I only treated as a supplement to my real income. I would hate to have to count on a few thousand here or there to get me by. Regardless, my hope for 2010 is higher payouts and less contests that rely on public voting.
@Andy Anderson
I would like to think that most serious freelance creatives dream of turning their passion into a career, don’t you?
Jared,
Ok, I’ll bump up my time estimate for the coors videos to 40 hours. I did spent a lot of time posting craigslist ads for extras. And working with the clips provided by coors was a little time consuming. But some of the extras were friends of mine and I had worked with some of the actors before. So most casting was done with a few phone calls/e-mails. The props were already built and just needed to be fixed up some. Since about 50% of the footage in each submission came from coors, I actually only created about 45 seconds of content. The shoots went very fast and including set up, shooting and clean up we were in and out in 5 hours. Even in a controlled setting I shoot like a guerilla filmmaker so I move really fast and try and do things very cheap.
As for keeping the lights on, I did ok this year. In May I decided to start entering as many contests as I could. That turned out to be about 2 or 3 contests a month and I won some kind of prize in about half of them. In maybe 30% of the contests I entered I won at least $1,000.
Some entries I shot for no money and only spent a few hours on. But for some of the big money contests (Doritos, fame, butterfinger) I put a lot of time and money into my productions. Ironically, those were the contests that never paid off. But I still came out ahead. I spent probably $3,000 shooting video contest entries in 2009 and wound up making maybe 1,500 to 2,500 a month between May and December. One month I might only win 500 bucks but the next month I might win 5,000.
And I think 2010 is going to be a much better year. I entered contests willy-nilly in 09 and I’ve learned a lot about which contests to enter and which to avoid. So my plan is to put more energy into fewer contests this year. My goal is to win a big money contest (something with a prize of at least 10K) but until that happens, the smaller contests are keeping me afloat. Plus I’m having fun, building my resume up and improving my skills which are all pretty nice bonuses.
Beardy,
Do me a favor and re-read your post and then consider this:
Beardy executes the labor described above and succeeds in producing content that a multibillion dollar company like Unilever considers worthy to promote their product(s) to the world.
Is that equitable?
It’s more than a little frustrating when I feel I am the only one who recognizes this usury for what it is.
The VCK
Obviously, it would have been great if Coors had offered more per spot. But it’s important to remember that competitions/open calls like this are gambles. Despite a few famous exceptions, “User-generated content” is still an unproven commodity. Yes, miller coors is a multi-million dollar company but somewhere inside that monolith is a team of marketing people who came up with this idea and got coors to pony up ten’s of thousands of dollars for it. If the poptent experiment was a big flop for them coors would survive, but a few marketing people would have a major failure around their necks. I think that’s the real reason contest prizes are low. It’s not because companies are cheap, it’s because the people who set up the contests want to limit their personal risk. If they get their company to spend $3,000 on a contest and someone submits an entry that the bosses love, then the marketing person is a hero. If the entries suck everyone just says “oh well, we only spent $3K, no big deal.”
Until “User-generated content” becomes a legitimate and reliable product in the eyes of marketing people, prices will stay low. So we have two options; We can refuse our services to all but the companies sponsoring bigger money competitions or we can submit high-quality work to smaller-money competitions and exceed the expectations of the companies that sponsor them.
This time around, coors was locked into to buying 6 ads. If they were forced to buy 6 amateurish, embarrassing ads, what kind of lesson would they walk away with? Would they think “Next time we’ll spend more money and that way we’ll get better submissions?” No. They’d probably think “well that sucked, we’re certainly never doing that again.”
Jared, just think of the Skinit.com contest. You went totally over the top and made a great ad for that company. They got a commercial they could actually air on TV for only $10K. They have seen that $10K can get them some really awesome entries. But apparently the prizes in the 2010 version of the competition are going to be much higher. Why? Because they are satisfied customers. People like you let them know that their faith in “the people” to create good content was justified. So they now feel comfortable taking things to the next level.
Hey Beardy,
Like I told you before, because the pickings are lean these days I am entering the Louis. Hot Sauce contest with a max. prize of $5,000. I will take the $5K, and maybe even the $2.5K if I only come in 2nd. I won’t take less than that. Just want to be clear with you about my also needing to collect a payday, and my regular willingness to underprice myself.
I respond to posts like yours because I think we should stimulate the debate about what is the next best step? What things might be possible for us as a union of creatives to increase our compensation. My fear is that we all will regularly start giving these contests better content than what currently passes for national quality (from Mad. Ave.)…….the kind of content they used to pay $300K – $400K for on a regular basis.
I really do hope there will be bigger and bigger paydays down the pike. I think what is going to save us is the natural forces of the market place. When the economy turns around and a 5-10 fold increase in businesses that were previously holding out, finally test the freelance waters. I think paydays will increase in response to demand. I trust market forces much more than kindness or appreciation from brands or marketing companies.
The VCK
Hey Beardy,
congrats to you!
I just wanted to comment on that last post of yours and say that you actually did a very good job of summing up the price-point issue, at least as I understand it.
it’s definitely an asset to be able to see things from both perspectives, and we hope and plan to be able to offer both higher purchase prices, as well as gigs, contract jobs and more in the future.
We’re glad you’re a part of things at poptent