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!”