2010 March | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

Fidelity’s “Be the Green Line” finalists

Posted by Dan L. on March 29th, 2010

On Friday, Fidelity Investments announced the 5 finalists in their “Be the Green Line” video contest. The idea for this one was quite unique; people were supposed to pretend to be an actual green line and then give someone advice or guidance. It’s a play on Fidelity’s current ad campaign where financial advisers help investors plan out their future via a “Green Line” to their goals.

Anyways, guess what? Your pal Beardy is one of the 5 finalists and I could use some help. If you have a youtube account, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could view my entry and then rate it 5 stars (or give it a “like” if you’re using youtube’s new layout) Instead of playing the green line myself, I created an odd, muppet-style green line puppet that ran around giving tips to random strangers. Here’s my video:

Now if you’re a regular reader of VCN you’ll know that I usually advise against entering contests that involve online voting. But the Fidelity contest is a very rare example of how to incorporate voting into a contest without rewarding cheaters. According to the “Be the Green Line” rules, Fidelity could have picked as many as 10 finalists and then after a public voting period, judges would pick the winner out of the 5 videos with the highest scores. But Fidelity saved all of us finalists a ton of grief by only picking 5 videos for this round! So there won’t be a big ugly fight to make it to the top 5. And mercifully, the voting period is only a week long which is just right if you ask me.

The rules say that the judges may or may not take youtube ratings into account when picking their winner. So I feel compelled to do a little campaigning. Plus, it looks like one or more contestants are having their friends down-vote my video! So now I have to try and get my score up as a matter of principle.

If you are so inclined, you can check out all 5 finalist videos here:

Thanks in advance for any 5-star ratings you wish to bestow up on my puppet opus!

Leaked! How to make a viral video

Posted by Dan L. on March 27th, 2010

Yesterday I heard from another contestant in Doritos’ Viralocity video contest and he asked me to check out his video. That of course is code for “please consider posting this on your blog!” Well, the video turned out to be great so I will indeed post it. Not only is it funny, it’s an awesome tutorial for video contest filmmakers who need to increase their view counts in view-based contests!

In his e-mail, the guy said that Doritos initially rejected his video because it contained unauthorized music. But he didn’t use any music, just chip bag sounds. So he missed out on a week of exposure. There are still 5 days left in the contest so if you want to help this guy in his quest for Viralocity, visit his page on the Doritos’ site and facebook and tweet him and link him and stuff: http://bit.ly/bjjyT0

I also got an update from the guy who made the for-charity, Viralocity video. (check my last post for the full story) He said his entry has started to creep up the rankings so if you want to support a good cause, go spread this video: http://bit.ly/djGMqG

Shilling for a good cause

Posted by Dan L. on March 24th, 2010

On Tuesday I blogged about Doritos’ odd, Canada-only video contest called Viralocity. Basically whoever can make their Doritos-naming video go the most viral, wins. Today, a filmmaker name Mark sent me a message. Here’s part of it:

“I created a video for the contest, but with the intention of donating all prize money to cancer and kids charities. Figured I’d rather give the money away than to some yahoo.” (Like the guy currently in first place- Beardy)

“I’m currently #26 out of around 1,200 entries and proud to say I’ve done it without spamming, proxy views or any other ways around the terribly designed scoring system Doritos has created.”

Feel free to check it out and help promote if you want – might be able to scoop some of the prize for a worthy endeavor…

http://www.doritosviralocity.ca/Gallery/VideoDetails.aspx?v=6435

Being #26 out of 1200 is pretty good. Since this is for a good cause I thought I’d increase the video’s viral-ness by posting it here. If you want to help Mark win won of the top prizes, you can start by watching his video below. If you want to really help him, visit the link above and get links to spread the videos on facebook, twitter, etc, etc, etc.

Good luck to Mark. We’ll let you know how he does.

Doritos’ OTHER video contest headed for a bad end

Posted by Dan L. on March 23rd, 2010

Poor Canada. Those chip-loving hosers weren’t eligible to participate in Dorito’s Crash the Superbowl commercial contest. But now that CTSB is over, Fritolay decided that our neighbors to the north deserved a contest of their own. So they launched a new video contest, “Doritos Viralocity,” just for them.

The premise of “Viralocity” is pretty neat but the execution is just….whoa, kinda nuts. Doritos released a new, un-named flavor of chips in Canada and asked the public to name it. Entrants were supposed to shoot a video that shows why the new flavor should get their suggested name. Like I said, it’s a cool idea.

If I were eligible to enter, I'd have called them "Beardy's Choice"

But considering how well-executed the Crash the Superbowl contest was, “Viralocity” is just plain crazy and confusing. The winner of the contest and the recipient of the $100,000 (CD) grand prize will be the video that goes the most viral. Doritos has a whole system of points set up to measure viralness. For example, every time a Canadian views an entry, that entry gets 5 points. But if someone outside Canada watches an entry, it gets 100 points. And each time it gets facebooked or tweeted or Dugg, different points are awarded. Some accomplishments can get you as many as 1,000 points. If you’re interested in the specifics, click here to see the full breakdown.

So what’s wrong with this system? Well for one, it’s basically just a giant online free-for-all. There’s no way Doritos could ever track all those views and clicks and posts so if someone really wanted to inflate their video’s score, it’d be very easy.

But worse than that though, it seems like the contest was almost intentionally designed to pick a terrible, horrible winner. Anyone who knows how the internet works could tell you that this contest is going to be won by some annoying guy with an idiotic show on youtube that’s super-popular with tweens and his video would some how be related to something those tweens really, really love. Like, I dunno…Twilight or something. There are still 10 days to go before the final scores are tallied but right now, it looks like this video, with a score of 1,852,667 points will probably wind up being the winner:

I knew the most “popular” video wouldn’t be very good but I never expected it to be straight up racist! Yeah the guy in the video is asian but that doesn’t mean it’s no big deal if he runs around mocking Chinese people. If that video wins, is Doritos really going to want to associate themselves with such an offensive caricature?

As expected, this dude who made that video has a very, very, very popular and his “show” is just one big joke about negative Asian stereotypes. In fact, this guy’s channel is so popular that his other entry in the contest is now ranked #3. If his videos were awesome this wouldn’t bother me but both entries are lame and the flavor names he picked have no relation to the videos. And it sorta seemed like that was the point of the contest. The only reason this dude is going to win is because he has a big social network. That means that every single filmmaker that actually tried to make a decent entry for this contest wasted their time.

Doritos should have seen this coming a mile away. When you let the internet decide what’s popular, you’re gonna wind up with some pretty lame, offensive, lowest-common-denominator type stuff.

And trust me, this guy IS probably going to win. The Viralocity website is set-up in such a way that you can see the most-popular videos. Since the Asian-bashing Twilight spoof is ranked #1, everyone is going to click it out of curiosity….and that of course keeps jacking the video’s score higher and higher.

It looks like Doritos managed to get a whopping 1,200 entries for this contest. If you’d like to sort through them, here’s the video gallery: http://www.doritosviralocity.ca/Gallery.aspx

Contest of Awesome

Posted by Dan L. on March 22nd, 2010

Hey, did you create a funny music video last year? Do you want a free trip to LA? And would you like to get to appear in music video with Weezer!?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then I have one more for you; do you have a time machine?? No!? Well then you’re shit outta luck, man because you should have submitted your funny 2009 music video to the “Contest of Awesome” like 3 months ago. But let’s not dwell on the past. BarelyDigital.com picked a bunch of finalists earlier this year and then let the public vote for their favorite funny video. Actually, online votes only counted for 50% of a video’s score which is always nice to hear. Judges gave the other 50% of a video’s score which means that basically, it was up to the judges who won.

The sponsor put together an “award ceremony” video to announce the winner. It is amusing and contains an attractive lady in a low-cut dress so I will embed it:

And here’s the video that won. The song is funny but the guy that steals the show is the Taco Bell employee that actually managed to get their whole order.

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: Trip to LA to appear in a Weezer video

You can see the other 11 finalist videos here: http://www.barelydigital.com/awesome/page/contest-vote

Sour Punch “Punch Up the Video” Contest

Posted by Dan L. on March 20th, 2010

Well it only took 8 months but our little site here has finally crawled far enough up the google ranking ladder that people searching simply for “video contests” can actually find us. Consequently, I’ve been getting a bunch more press releases from companies looking to promote their video contests. There are a ton of great sites that list new contests so I usually leave the announcements to them. But if I get asked to promote a contest by an especially nice PR person, or if a contest seems especially cool, I’ll post it. So expect to see more contest announcements in the future. In fact, let’s do one now…

I just got an e-mail asking me share the details of the new Sour Punch video contest. The e-mailer actually started his message off with “Dear Beardy” which put a smile on my beardless face. So here are the details straight from the press release:

American Licorice Company today announced the launch of the Sour Punch “Punch Up the Video Contest” where contestants are asked to create a parody of their favorite TV Show or Movie by recreating a scene and incorporating Sour Punch into the dialogue or action.

Limiting their video submissions to three minutes in length, contestants can incorporate Sour Punch into the scene however they choose, whether it’s into the dialogue or used on set as props. One winner will be selected each week based on a combination of creativity and public votes/views. At the end of the contest submission period on July 25th, one of the weekly winners will be selected as the Grand Prize winner. Each weekly winner will take home a $100 Visa gift card. The Grand Prize Winner will take home a Flip HD Ultra Video Camcorder and a $1500 Visa gift card. There is no limit to the number of videos an entrant can submit. For complete contest rules visit www.sourpunch.com.

At first I wasn’t going to promote this contest since it seemed like the winners were going to be chosen by mostly by a public vote…and those contests are ALWAYS won by people who figure out a way to cheat. But reading through the rules, I found this breakdown of how the a videos’ score would be tabulated:

Sour Punch Judging Criteria

Creativity (50%)
Quality (40%)
Public Appeal (10%)

“Public Appeal” means a video’s “Popularity.” And it’s only worth 10% of your score! Now we’re talking. 5% of that is a video’s view count and 5% is its star rating. That’s the way every vote-based video contest should work. Contestants get just enough incentive to send links out and encourage their friends to vote but they don’t have enough incentive to cheat. Perfect.

Though the top prize in this contest is only $1,500, entering would probably be worth your time. Every week, for the next 20 weeks, one video will be selected (according to the judging criteria) and will receive a $100 prize.

Since most people will shoot their entries right before the deadline in July, if you shoot one now you’d probably have a really decent chance of winning 100 bucks. Sure, that ain’t exactly a ton of cash but hey, we’re in the middle of the fricking Great Recession here. 100 bucks is 100 bucks. And if you win, you go on to the finals and have a 1 in 20 chance of winning $1,500.

The Sour Punch contest site links to some of the “entries” that have been received so far. But since the contest doesn’t officially open until Monday, I’m guessing those are just sample videos created by the company. Still, if you’d like to get an idea of the kind of thing the are looking for, check out these Sour Punch parodies of the two most parodied films of 1994; Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction.

http://www.sourpunch.com/videoContest/#/watch?v=30

http://www.sourpunch.com/videoContest/#/watch?v=31

VCN Interview with Crash the Superbowl co-winner, Kyle Gerardi

Posted by Dan L. on March 15th, 2010

In the Doritos Skybox. From left to right: Kyle Gerardi, Nick Dimondi, Joshua Svoboda, Barrett Phillips. Not Pictured (others involved in the commercials) Wes Phillips, Dale Backus (Producers) Brian Oliver and Rosie the dog (Actors in Underdog) and Wayne Phillips (the old man Kids These Days).

Though four consumer-made Doritos commercials aired during the Superbowl back in February, the big winner of this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest were a group of friends from North Carolina who operate under the banner, 5 Point Productions. Last December, that small team of independent filmmakers learned that both entries they shot for the 2009/2010 installment of the contest made it to the finals. When you consider that Doritos received more than 4,000 submissions this year and only picked 6 finalist videos, getting 2 of the 6 top spots is really an incredible achievement.

And if you aren’t impressed enough yet, here’s another amazing fact; The 5 Point Productions team also WON the Crash the Superbowl contest the first year it ran in 2006/2007.

When I first heard that one team had gotten two commercials into Doritos’ “Top 6” I was stunned. And when I realized that these guys were the same filmmakers that won the first CTSB contest I was almost ready to start screaming “shenanigans!” But before I could even develop a decent conspiracy theory, I got a message from one of the producers of the two 5 Point entries (entitled “Kids These Days” and “Underdog”) and he explained that Doritos had no idea that the two entries were made by the same team. It‘s easy to believe it was all just a coincidence because both of the team’s entries are just that good! “Underdog” was actually my favorite entry even before the finalists were announced and I thought it would have a very good chance of scoring big on the USA Today ad meter. Turns out I was right. “Underdog” went on to be one of the four finalist videos to air during the superbowl and was ranked the #2 best commercial of the game on the USA Today Ad Meter. That feat earned the team a bonus of $600,000 from Doritos.

When you ball all that good news together you know what you get? The greatest set of accomplishments in video contest history, that’s what. Sure, the Herbert Brothers landed the #1 spot on the USA Today ad meter and earned a million dollar bonus last year for their CTSB entry, “” but I think the combined achievements of the 5 Point Productions team top that easily. For God’s sake, they won 2 out of the 3 years the contest has been run! That’s amazing. I was really interested in hearing some behind the scenes details about this whole thing and one of the producers of “Underdog” and “Kids these Days,” Kyle Girardi offered to answer a few questions. Before we get into his answers, here are his team’s Crash the Superbowl spots:

The above is the 5 Point Team’s entry for the 2006/2007 Crash the Superbowl contest, “Live the Flavor.” This commercial went on to be the CTSB winner and aired during the game in ’07. This was for the first installment of the contest and back then, the prize for making it to the finals was $10,000 and there were no bonuses to be won if your ad made it to air.

Here’s the team’s 2009/2010 entry “Kids These Days.” This spot was selected by Doritos as one of this year’s 6 finalists. The prize for being a finalist is $25,000.

Finally, here’s the team’s other 2009/2010 entry, “Underdog.” This commercial ALSO made it to the finals and so they recived an additional $25,000 finalist prize. On top of that of course, they also recived a $600,000 bonus for scoring so well on the ad meter. “Underdog” was the only Doritos commercial to crack the Top 10 on the ad meter on Superbowl sunday.

Now that you’re caught up, let’s get on with the interview!

————————————-

VCN: So who and what is 5 Point Productions?

KYLE: That’s kind of a tough one. 5 Point was started in 2007 when they made the first Doritos ad. Josh Svoboda and I weren’t part of the team at that time, but we were good friends with most of them from middle school. Its only been about a year that he and I have really been an active part of the 5 Point team. As for 5 Point’s future: “Underdog” and “Kids These Days” might be the last you see of 5 Point, we’re gonna try and take a few jobs if we need them, but right now the main focus is on a short film.

VCN: What kind of gear did you use to shoot “Underdog” and “Kids These Days?” Do you own your gear?

KYLE: We used the Canon 5D Mark II to shoot both commercials. It’s a pretty inexpensive camera that shoots incredible HD footage, so we had to get one.

VCN: I was amazed when I found out that one team of filmmakers had gotten two entries in the finals this year and I was totally blown away when I found out that you guys were the winners of the 2007 contest. Did Doritos know “Underdog” and “Kids These Days” were by you guys? If not, how did they react when they found out?

KYLE: No, they didn’t know at first. We put different names and addresses on the commercials just in case they liked them both. We couldn’t believe for the longest time that both were finalist, we thought some sorry son of a bitch was playing a joke on us.

VCN: Did anyone ever worry that it might look kind of suspicious that the 2007 winners did so well again this year? Do you think Doritos would have picked both your videos if they knew who made them?

KYLE: I think so. Josh’s name was on Underdog and he had no connection with the competition in 2007 whatsoever. However, “Kids These Days” had the name of one the people involved in the 2007 commercial, but I like to think they just picked it because they thought it was a great spot.

: The 5 Points team filming “Kids these Days”

VCN: A few days before the Superbowl, CBS aired a TV special about Superbowl commercials and they aired “Kids these Days” and said it was one of the ads that were going to play on Sunday. It of course didn’t air though. Did you guys get a ton of calls from people telling you your ad was going to air? Do you know how or why that happened?

KYLE: I don’t know what that was about, but our phones were ringing off the hook. I tried not to pay much attention to it, but I figured if CBS was airing the Super Bowl they knew what commercials that were going to play… It kind of killed my buzz. I always had a lot more faith in Underdog, truth be told.

VCN: “Underdog” was the first CTSB winner of the night to air. Was there a special reason for that?

KYLE: Probably because I was being a little weirdo during the Super Bowl. I think they just called CBS and told them to play it first so I would calm the hell down. It’s torture not knowing if your commercial is gonna air or not, and I had no idea I’d handle pressure so terribly. My heart was about to pound out of my chest during every commercial break. If it weren’t for the 2 Xanax I took before the game I most likely would have had a heart attack.

VCN: Do you guys know how your videos did in the online voting? Do you know if you made the top three or do you think that “Underdog” might have been Dortio’s choice as the bonus ad?

KYLE: I’m not going to say how I know, but I know for a fact we had enough votes to make top 3.

VCN: How did you guys find out you won 2nd place on the ad meter? How’d you celebrate?

KYLE: It was actually Dave Herbert who told us at first, he had his cell phone on him and was surfing the web. It wasn’t really set in stone until Rudy Wilson (CEO Doritos) got up in front of everyone on the bus ride back to the hotel and said “I’m out $600 grand, because Underdog got 2nd place.”

I remember the feeling that came over me, the first thing that popped in my head was “I can finally make a movie.” I can’t think of a happier moment in my life. That night we didn’t really celebrate that much. We had a few beers and got to say goodbye to everyone… It was really sad leaving those guys, all the other finalists are amazing people. Believe it or not I was hoping to see Snack Attack or Smackout play in the 4th spot over “Kids These Days.”

: On the set of Underdog. The small camera in the shot is the Canon 5D used to film both finalist videos.

VCN: You obviously spent a lot of time with the Crash the Superbowl folks. Did you get the impression that they will bring the contest back this fall?

KYLE: I think they will. It looked like they got just as big a rush out of it as we did.

VCN: What do you guys plan to do now?

KYLE: We got some attention from the commercials, so we’re gonna try and make some extra dough. Within the next month or so I’d also like to get rolling on a short film.

VCN: If the CTSB contest comes back, would you guys be up for replacing the Herbert Brothers as the “Kings of the Crash” and being the contest’s spokesmen? (I think that’d be great and I hope that’s what happens)

KYLE: Certainly not me personally. I’m way to ugly to be in front of the camera.

VCN: You guys certainly seem to have figured out the recipe for success in this particular contest. Have any advise for aspiring Crash the Superbowl contestants?

KYLE: I guess just don’t be too hard on yourself. Before I knew we were finalists I was convinced that “Underdog” and “Kids These Days” were the two biggest piles of shit on the planet. I couldn’t believe Doritos picked them. Sorry, I know “believe in yourself” sounds lame.

VCN: Thanks a ton to Kyle for taking the time to answer our questions and congratulations to all of his teammates!

Vote-Based video contests: A Cautionary Tale

Posted by Dan L. on March 10th, 2010

Last fall, I found a contest sponsored by Fed-Ex called the “Why I need a bailout” video contest. Apparently, Fed-ex’s rival, UPS was lobbying for a bailout and the contest was designed to mock them. Fed-ex even built a whole website dedicated to making fun of “The Brown Bailout.“ The concept for the site and the video contest was harsh and kinda mean-spirited…so I knew I had to enter. The idea was that you were supposed to explain why you needed a bailout and Fed-Ex would give 5 people a thousand bucks each. Plus, every finalist would get 100 bucks!

Normally I don’t enter contests with such a low top prizes but since there were 5 prizes up for grabs and I figured it’d be worth a few hours of my time. So I wrote, shot and submitted what turned out to be a really good entry. But I had been a little too eager to enter this one. I read the rules after I submitted and realized I probably had just wasted my time….

The 5 winners were to be determined by a public vote.

Crap. Fed-ex was supposed to pick 10 to 30 finalists and the public would vote for their favorites. Turns out they only got like 30 entries and so everyone got to be a finalist. All humility aside, my entry was easily the best. Hands down, all the way, the best. I sent out links to friends and tried to get some votes. But immediately I noticed that the scores of certain videos were surging upwards. To vote, you had to enter your name and some other info, fill in a CAPTCHA and the hit the “VOTE” button. But I, and about 10 of the other finalists quickly realized that if you cleared your web browser’s history and then refreshed the page, you could vote again and again and again. And here’s the most outrageous part…the contest’s rules in no way forbid voting for yourself as many times as you wanted! In fact, the rules actually said You can vote for your favorite video as many times as you want!! A free-for-all was inevitable.

yuck.

After a few days of trying to get votes, I gave up. All I could do was watch in amazement as some of the other contestants added hundreds of votes to their scores a day. In the end, the top 5 winners had thousands of votes. (and some of the losing videos had fewer than 50!) Going at a steady pace, re-peat voters were probably able to post 5 votes a minute which means they spent dozens of hours voting for themselves over and over and over. It was interesting to see some of them give up one at a time. Certain videos would get hundreds of new votes a day and then suddenly, their vote counts stopped going up. The 10-way race went down to a 9-way, then a 8-way, then a 7-way race. The people I felt sorry for were the ones that voted for themselves more than a thousand times but could never catch up to the people who eventually made the top 5.

It was obvious to anyone who looked at the contest site that the winners had cheated (well, technically they hadn’t “cheated” since re-voting wasn’t against the rules but it certainly looked like cheating) I tried to contact Fed-ex and got no response. I got an e-mail announcing the winners and that was it. But the winners were so embarrassing (seriously, some of them were like cell phone quality videos shot in dark rooms) and the cheating was so flagrant that Fed-Ex pretended like the whole thing never happened. They removed all the videos, hid the contest page and didn’t even mention the results on the “Brown Bailout” blog (they had been hyping the contest there for weeks.) All links to the contest page had been removed from the site but I had bookmarked it. They did list the winners but…and this blows my mind, there is no way to actually watch the winning videos. What kind of video contest doesn’t even give links to the winning videos?? A really crappy one, that’s what kind.

On the bright side, at least they did send me my 100 bucks for making the finals.

A few weeks back I saw a listing for BlueBerry Muffin Tops’s “Blast of Blueberry” video contest and thought about entering for about half a minute. But then I saw in the rules that the sponsor would pick some finalists and then the “public” would vote for the winner…and that winner would only get a $1,500 prize. The logistics of that contest flashed me back to that sad, Fed-Ex “Brown Bailout” contest. That one sucked so much that I was too embarrassed to even write about it here when it went down. With those dark memories fresh in my head, I back-paged away as quickly as I could from the Blueberry Muffin Top site and thought to myself “I sure feel bad for the suckers who are going to enter that contest.”

Turns out, one of the suckers who entered that contest is a fan of VCN! A reader named Matt wrote me and explained he had made it to the “BBMT” finals. His entry is definitely one of the best and I voted for it. You can too by clicking here:

/videos/

You have to register to vote of course. Matt’s entry is the one that has the thumbnail of a test subject talking to a scientist. Here’s a direct link: Matt’s Video.

Matt’s certainly going to have a tough time winning this one. If you’ve ever entered a vote-based video contest you know that money makes people go fucking apeshit crazy. Sure, $1,500 is a lot but some contestants will spend dozens and dozens of hours registering and voting, registering and voting, registering and voting just so they can win a little cash.

I’ve entered a few vote-based video contests over the years but Fed-Ex’s Brown Bailout contest was the last straw for me. After that one ended, I decided never again to enter a contest where the winners were picked solely by “public vote.” Really, it just isn’t worth the effort to pester my family and friends to vote for my video if some jerks are just going to sit at their computer all day and vote for themselves over and over. So heed my warnings; if a contest is letting the public pick it’s winner, DO NOT ENTER.