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

Think Fed-Ex first when shipping body parts

Posted by Dan L. on April 30th, 2010

The “Think Fed-ex first” assignment over at Poptent.net closed last week when the brand purchased three user-created ads for $5,000 a piece. All three ads are pretty good but this one is just genius:

Purchased by Fed-Ex. Price: $5,000

That right there was more memorable than any commercial I saw on TV all week. One reason I really like spec ads and video contest stuff is because you never know what you’re going to get. That’s probably why so many marketing people like contests too. Would a big money ad agency ever have the nerve to pitch a spot to Fed-Ex called “Human Head?” This seems like the kind of idea that a bunch of pros would joke about and then shove in a file because the client might think it was too dark. But when you shoot a project on spec you’re feel to do whatever the hell you want because you have nothing to lose. 99 out of 100 times, the results are a mess and the creator misses the mark. But when off the wall ideas actually work, the client winds up with something far more interesting than the average old commercial.

You can see see the other two purchased ads over on the Poptent blog. The one with the Teddy Bear is especially amusing.

The Herbert Brothers return to video contests

Posted by Dan L. on April 27th, 2010

The true video contest kings, Joe and Dave Herbert have come out of their unofficial retirement and gotten back in to the contest game. The duo is best known for winning One Million Dollars from Doritos after their was ranked the best ad of the 2009 Superbowl. That alone makes them the biggest video contest winners of all time even though they have only created a handful of contest entries over the years. Actually, they made the Doritos finals twice (first in 2006/2007 again in 2008/2009) which is also an amazing accomplishment.

After winning the biggest video contest in the world, there’s no place to go but down. So I got the impression from interviews (including the one I did myself with the brothers) that Joe and Dave Herbert were going to take themselves out of competition for good. But even after you’ve won a million bucks, 100 grand is hard to resist. So the brothers are back with an entry in the Godaddy contest. Here it is:

That’s pretty funny and super professional. I was shocked at first because for the first 10 second or so I assumed the bearded guy in a white suit was Jesus partying down in a club in heaven. (that’s actually how I prefer to picture Jesus) If Godaddy thought their ads were controversial before, partying-Jesus would teach them what real controversy was like. But the castaway twist was a nice surprise. The bearded guy did an especially nice acting job too. I hope he got to keep the suit because that look was really working for him.

If you’d like to vote for the Herbert bros’ ad, click here and give them stars: http://bit.ly/92snxn

Damn the man! More government sponsored contests

Posted by Dan L. on April 23rd, 2010

That's where The Man lives

If you read our post on monday about the EPA’s new regulation-themed video contest, you’ll know that there are a few people out there that feel that the government is basically trying to control our lives and government-sponsored video contests are just another one of their propaganda tools. (check out the comments on this article about the contest to read the thoughts of some seriously pissed people) Elsewhere on the web, a frequent video contester has even called for filmmakers to boycott the EPA contest. I have seen tons of video contests run by government agencies (the EPA alone seems to do like one a month) so I’m really surprised that folks just noticed this was going on. Common sense tells me that government agencies are going to receive X amount of dollars a year for PR no matter how much people complain. If they’re going to spend the money, at least some of it will go to filmmakers if they hold video contests. In fact…one could argue that government-run video contests actually SAVE taxpayers money. For example, the EPA just ran a PSA contest about fireplace safety. (you can watch the submissions ) The winner of that contest will get $2,500 and their video will actually air on tv around the country.

Do you know what that means? It means the federal government was able to but a national PSA for the bargain basement price of just $2,500! So the “Learn Before you Burn” contest sounds like a win-win-win situation to me. The government gets to save 10′s of thousands of dollars on a PSA, a independent filmmaker gets a little cash and a lot of exposure and maybe a few more people won’t die in fires.

While we’re on the subject of contests sponsored by Big Brother, I thought I’d post there results of the “USA.GOV” contest. It was held to increase awareness of what people can get done with USA.gov. Here’s the winner. It’s pretty neat and features a catchy little tune:

First Place: Prize: $2,500 of the taxpayers money

Drudge Report starts posting video contest news

Posted by Dan L. on April 19th, 2010

When you read the Drudge Report you expect to see stories about Tea-partiers and their guns or which communist leader Obama most recently bowed to, not video contests. But check out this screencap from today’s edition of the website:

See that headline on the top left? “EPA Contest Seeks Videos Promoting Government Regulations…” It always suprises me when I see video contests mentioned in the media. But I never thought I’d see one posted on the Drudge Report.

I saw that EPA contest listing the other day and actually thought about entering it. It never crossed my mind that it was political in any way though. I guess it is kind of weird to hold a pro-government regulations video contest but is it really something conservatives need to get all pissed about? (check out the comments on the article. It’s nothing but angry, anti-government, anti-EPA stuff from Drudge readers) To build on what the article says, government regulation is what keeps the asbestos out of your house, the lead out of your kid’s toys and the cyanide out of your drinking water. Hey….that’s actually not a bad line. Maybe I will enter after all. In your face, Drudge!

2010 Taxslayer.com contest videos

Posted by Dan L. on April 16th, 2010

MAY 5, 2010 UPDATE: This morning, Taxslayer sent out e-mails to everyone who submitted videos for this year’s competition and announced that the contest was being CANCELED due to lack of submissions. As you will see below, I found 18 video submissions for this year’s contest and some of them are very good. I have been following and entering online video contests since 2007 and I have NEVER seen this kind of thing happen before. It’s a total shock and major disappointment that one of the most established and best known contests would do this to all the people who spent precious time, money and resources making videos for them.

I can tell from my web-logs that a number of people have found this post after searching for reasons behind today’s the cancellation. We will be doing a thorough post about this later this week but for now, if you entered the 2010 Taxslayer video contest please let us know at .

2nd Update: We just put up a new post about the cancellation of the taxslayer contest. You can find it here: https://videocontestnews.com/2010/05/05/taxslayer-com-cancels-video-contest-20-days-after-the-submission-deadline/

Well yesterday was April 15^th: Tax Day. If you won a lot of money in video contests last year, right about now you’re probably wishing you had saved some of that money to pay your tax bill. But April 15^th was also the deadline for the third annual Taxslayer.com video contest. For weeks I had been wrestling with several ideas for this one but I just couldn’t get them to work. So eventually I decided to just skip the contest this year. But about 9 days ago, a fresh idea hit me and I figured I should to go for it. I was even motivated to finally buy the HD camera I had been considering.

I photoshopped my props on Wednesday and I bought my camera on Thursday. I spent a few hours trying to figure the thing out and then we filmed on Friday. By Monday I had both my 30 second and 15 second versions (remember, you had to submit 2 versions for this one) edited and done.

So after all that work, I was totally burnt out by Monday. Then…another idea hit me. I figured I had spent so much money on my new camera that I should try and get some use out of it so I wrote, produced, shot and edited a second entry in record time…well, record time for me, anyway.

One of the rules of the taxslayer contest is that contestants must upload their entries to youtube and tag them “taxslayer2010.” As far as I can tell, 18 pairs of videos were submitted. And there are some pretty good ones in there. Since taxslayer doesn’t post all the entries, I thought I’d embed the 30 second versions of all of them below. These are in order by upload date from last to first. Can you spot which two entries are mine? I’ll reveal them at the bottom of the post.

So the two entries I did are “It’s Tax Time!” (The one with the people playing the board game) and “Use Taxslayerrrrr.com” (the one with the pirates and their booty.) I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out. I did forget one of the five required “Taxslayer.com” mentions in my pirate ad and had to use some creative editing to squeeze one more in though.

If I see any more entries, I will update this post. But I think these are all of them. If you have any thoughts about who will win first ($15,000) and second ($5,000) this year, post them in the comments.

Binaca Contest winner

Posted by Dan L. on April 11th, 2010

If you’re not familiar with the contest site Tongal.com, they do contests in various stages. First comes the concept phase where anyone can pitch an idea for an entry. Judges pick their favorite 5 ideas and then filmmakers are supposed to go out and shoot an entry based of the selected concepts. Binaca recently ran a contest through Tongal and it had a prize pool of $7,000. But a lot of people got a slice of that pie. The first place video got $3K and the first place concept got $1K and then all kinds of other people got smaller amounts. I guess it’s cool that so many people get to win something but I prefer contests that offer a few big prizes rather than a ton of smaller prizes. For instance, in the Binaca contest, the guy who won 5th place in the concept phase got only $50. But the $3000 winning entry used his idea. The concept creator did get a bonus $150 because of that though. Still, $200 for the winning idea seems kinda low. Here was the 5th place pitch by Chip Bolcik:

“My concept is a ‘March of Time’ commercial showing how everything changes through time except the need to have fresh breath before a kiss. Binaca has been around forever. Let’s show how people through the ages have always used it before a kiss.”

And here’s the winning video based on that idea by John Jones:

First Place. Prize: $3000

More winning concepts, videos and other prize-winning stuff here: http://www.tongal.com/app/contestDetail.action?id=25

Doritos’ unexpected Viralocity winner

Posted by Dan L. on April 5th, 2010

About two weeks back I blogged about Dortios’ Canadian video contest, Viralocity. The objective was to come up with a name for Doritos’ new mystery flavor chip and then make a video explaining the suggestion. The winner was to be determined by points that were earned by how many views, stars, tweets, posts, links etc a video got.

Back on March 23rd, the video that was leading the pack was this unpleasant, racist entry from some internet-famous dude named Peter Chao: http://www.doritosviralocity.ca/Gallery/VideoDetails.aspx?v=440481

The maker of that video apparently has an online fan base so big that his other entry was also ranked #3. But the Viralocity contest ended last Wednesday and the next day Doritos announced that another video had scored the most points and was the winner of the $100,000 prize. Aside from the money, Doritos is also going to name the mystery flavor the winning suggestion. Here it is:

First Place. Prize: $100,000

That’s an amusing video and Spice 2.0 is a decent name for a chip. It’s especially appropriate considering the nature of the contest. So Doritos really dodged a bullet here. What would they have done if the racist entry had managed to stay in first place? Would the company really want to stand up and say “Congratulations to our winner, Peter Chao for his hilarious video about how funny Asians are when they try and speak English!”

I’m glad the racist New Moon parody video didn’t win but….you can’t help but wonder if maybe that video had some “help” slipping into second place. After all, the point system Doritos devised is complicated and contestants don’t get a full accounting of where all of their points came from. This reminds me of the movie Election. Remember that one? Matthew Broderick was the teacher who ran the Student body president election? And Reese Witherspoon was the perfect, horrible candidate Tracy Flick? Matthew Broderick’s character was in charge of officially counting the ballots and after he realized Tracy had won by one vote, he just crumpled up two of her votes and declared the nice guy she was running against the winner. If Doritos wanted to rig this contest it would be just as simple as crumpling up (or adding) a few thousand electronic points. If they did that, who would ever know? Just maybe the head of the contest and one IT guy.

But I don’t think that happened. I’m sure the Spice 2.0 guy won fair and square. Peter Chao probably slipped out of first because he exhausted his fan base early on. The Spice 2.0 video was funny and topical so it kept getting passed on.

So I don’t believe that Doritos did anything unfair here. But fans of Peter Chao do. If you check out and Facebook pages you’ll see a lot of angry comments from them there. The hilarious irony is that many of them are accusing Doritos of racism! They suspect that Doritos rigged the contest because they didn’t want the winner to be Asian. Sometimes, when I see how stupid some of the people of the Internet can be, I fear very much for our future.

Whatever happened, don’t feel too bad for that racist goofball. His two videos scored 2nd and 3rd place and so he should be receiving $15,000 and $10,000 prize. Lots of other cash prizes are going to people who scored well. You can see all those winners here:

http://www.doritosviralocity.ca/Gallery.aspx

Any video that scored 14th place or better will get at least $1,000. Most of the videos aren’t too great though since this was a contest about “viralocity” and not quality. That’s just one reason why running this kind of social network-fueled contest is a bad idea. Another reason is that everyone who didn’t win walks away pissed at the sponsor. Just go to Peter Chao’s facebook page and look and see how many of his 100,000+ fans are screaming “Boycott Doritos!”

$10,000 AMD Awareness winner

Posted by Dan L. on April 3rd, 2010

The Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Alliance announced the winners of their AMD Awareness video contest this week. This was a big one. First place was $10,000, second was $2,000 and third and fourth place was $1,000 each. The point of the contest was pretty straightforward; make a video explaining what AMD is, what the symptoms are and encourage people to get tested. Here’s the winner:

First Place. Prize: $10,000

I like the winning vid. It’s nice and simple and gets the point across. The other winners and honorable mentions can be seen here: http://www.amdalliance.org/en/film-contest.html

The AMD website said that “more than 40” entries were received for this contest. Since this was kind of a serious topic, that’s a pretty good number. After all, shooting a PSA about people losing their vision isn’t really as fun as making a Butterfinger commercial. Still, I’m surprised more people didn’t go after this one. Since there were 4 cash prizes, anyone who entered would have about a 1 in 4 chance of winning at least a thousand dollars. And you’d have a 1 in 40-something chance of winning 10 grand. Those are amazing odds when you think about it.

If you’ve entered a few video contests but never won one, the best advice I can give is for you to pick your battles more carefully. After watching so many contests play out I’ve realized that most filmmakers who do enter these contests set their price tags way, way too high. I don’t understand why hundreds of people are winning to gamble a Saturday afternoon shooting an entry for a huge-money contest but shooting an entry for a $5,000 contest isn’t worth their time. Just look at the Crash the Superbowl contest. 4,000+ people entered that one last year because millions of dollars were up for grabs. People spent lots of money and time making amazing entries that only had a 1 in 675 chance of making it to the finals. And this year, all but 1 finalist entry won a big cash prize after they scored well on the Ad meter. So the other finalists walked away with just $25K in cash.

So what is smarter to enter? The contest where you have a 1 in 40 chance of winning $10K or the contest where you have a 6 in 4,000 chance of winning $25K…and then a 1 in 2 chance of having your commercial air during the superbowl…and then a 3 in 60 chance of being rated one of the top spots of the game and winning the BIG money?