This morning, Taxslayer.com sent out an e-mail to everyone who submitted videos for this year’s Taxslayer commercial contest and announced that the 2010 competition was being CANCELED due to lack of submissions. This announcement comes almost 3 weeks after the April 15th cut off for submissions.
I have been following and entering online video contests since 2007 and I have NEVER seen this kind of thing happen before. I have seen one or two small contests disappear before any entries were recived but I think canceling a video contest after the deadline might be totally unprecedented. It’s a huge 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. A few weeks ago, I posted every 2010 Taxslayer entry I could find right here. I found 18 entries…and two of them were mine. Among those 18 entries I saw several that I thought would make great winners. I guess taxslayer didn’t feel the same way. Here’s the e-mail I got this morning:
Dear Contest Participant,
First we would like to thank you for your entry into the 2010 TaxSlayer.com Commercial Contest. We received some great submissions and are very thankful for your efforts. Regrettably we did not receive the required number of entries for the contest. Pursuant to section four of the Official Contest Rules, “If a minimum (number of)… entries are not received by the end of the contest period…the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.” With this in mind, the contest will be voided effective immediately. Once again we would like to thank you for your participation. Please know that as a result of this, you are released of all of your duties and obligations pursuant to the official rules.
Sincerely,
The TaxSlayer Team
What really bothers me about this message is that the “Taxslayer Team” implies that they had no choice but to cancel the contest if a minimum number of entries were not received. This however, is not true. This is the statement from this morning’s e-mail:
“Pursuant to section four of the Official Contest Rules, “If a minimum (number of)… entries are not received by the end of the contest period…the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.” With this in mind, the contest will be voided effective immediately.”
And this is what “section four of the official contest rules” actually say:
“If a minimum twenty five (25) (submitted by separate individuals) entries are not received by the end of the contest period, at the sole discretion of the sponsor, the contest will be void and no prizes will be awarded.”
As you can see, those ellipses replaced some crucial details. Taxslayer.com was not legally required to cancel their contest if they didn’t get more than 25 entries. The contest could be voided AT THE DISCRETION OF THE SPONSOR. Translation; we don’t have to cancel it if we don’t want to.
I’m guessing that Taxslayer got a lot of angry e-mails today. Sadly, they don’t even respect contestants enough to answer these messages individually. I contacted Taxslayer and asked a number of questions. They ignored my questions and e-mailed me the same form-letter response they apparently sent to everyone. Here it is:
Dear —,
First let me apologize on a personal note for the cancellation of the contest. I apologize if there was any confusion as to whether or not the contest would be canceled. We understand that everyone who participated committed valuable time and resources and for that we are grateful. Please note that this is our third video contest and we have never had to cancel before. In years past we have received well over the required number of submissions. Please know that we never anticipated coming up short this year. In many cases we have worked with more contestants than just the winner. That being said the number of submissions wasn’t enough to work with this year. All of the videos will remain on our radar as we plan our marketing for next tax season. If there is a video or idea that we feel would work well with our plans we will be sure to contact that contestant on an individual basis and they will in turn be compensated accordingly. Please be assured that your submissions will not be disregarded just because the contest has been cancelled.
Sincerely,
Daniel Eubanks
I have a lot more I want to say about this but I’m going to cut things off here, for now. I have some interesting information that I’m not ready to share yet but I’ll probably get into it later this week. In the meantime, if you entered this year’s taxslayer contest, we want to hear from you. Please leave a comment or e-mail us at .
Posted in 
Tags: 
Yep, I’m one of the one’s who entered, got the same emails and communication as you.
[...] Wanna see a more comprehensive round up of this contest? Check out the excellent blog run by Beardy over at https://videocontestnews.com [...]
Wow. That’s terrible. So sorry to all the creators who put energy into this contest.
For the record, we have never, ever canceled a commercial assignment on Poptent after running over 60+ of them over 2 years. Just sayin’.
Ok, so am I the only person who suspects that taxslayer never planned to pick any winners in this contest? The rules were so stupid and complicated it seemed likek they were hoping no one would enter.
Hey HappyJoel and Mark, nice to see the big players of the contest world paying attention to this
I also entered. I think some shady nonsense is going down here. And yea Chris, the rules were really asinine. Beta tapes??
Though, luckily Poptent.net has a specific type of contest open to videos that didn’t win, or in this case, didn’t have a chance. So head over there and check it out. It’s called “2nd Chance”. Should be on the main page.
they should have just gave away 5K to the best video, if they weren’t going to follow through with the full prize of 15K, the beta tape thing was weird but that was only needed if u were a finalist.
Yes, this was a scam, obviously. I saw that thing about the “beta tape” and knew something was fishy. I never saw an address of where to send the tape but I also never saw anything that said only the finalists had to send a tape. I think they put that in there as a fail safe. I think that even if they did get enough videos they would have claimed that no one submitted a beta tape so everyone was disqualified. But why would they go through all the trouble of having a contest if they didn’t want to pick any winners?
i don’t think it was a scam this was the third time they ran it, and I emailed them when I submitted asking about the beta tape and they said to send if notified as a finalist. I just don’t think they wanted to shell out the 15k to one of only 18 videos, which kinda sucks.
I like to think I can spot a bad contest when I see one, which is one if the many reasons this whole thing bothers me. I feel like an idiot for trusting these people. “Scam” is not the right word but the contest was…mysterious. The rules were very complicated and very weird this year which is strange since the rules were totally straight forward the first two times they ran the contest. You’d think that over time, they’d get better at running the contest, not worse. I couldn’t believe that the guy from taxslayer had the nerve to say that they “never anticipated coming up short this year” in his message. I talked to him about that very possibility! They knew that they weren’t getting many entries. Maybe a week before the deadline they sent out an e-mail to last year’s contestants saying “hey, are you going to do an entry this year??”
So I don’t think this was a “scam.” I think this was just a terribly run contest. I think that they saw a loophole that could save them $20,000 and they took advantage of it, even though that meant they had to screw a lot of people. In the 2nd message I got, the taxslayer guy said the company may actually buy some of the ideas from this contest. So they’ll get to have their cake and eat it too. I bet they’d pay $3,000 to use a submitted idea. If the contest hadn’t been canceled, and if they had selected 2 winners, they would have gotten two concepts for 20K. Now they can get 2 concepts for $6K. That’s a hard bargain for a “financial services company” to pass up.
if you read a lot of contest rules, they almost all say something along the lines of “we can cancel this contest at any time”, or “we can reject your entry if we feel like it”. We should not be surprised by this event. Sorry to all 18 of you who made an ad.
we have to remember, we are not hired guns, were not freelancers. we enter contests. and we have all seen the best ad does not always get picked.
if i had a contest and only had 18 so so entries, i would cancel it also. maybe give each person like $100.
David,
There’s a little more to the story than what I’ve talked about so far. At least there’s more to my part of the story. I don’t want to get in the dirty details yet though because I’m waiting for a response from taxslayer.
But as anyone who entered the contest last year will tell you, like a week before the deadline, taxslayer e-mailed all of us and sent this message:
“We are quickly approaching the April 15th deadline for the 2010 TaxSlayer.com video contest. We noticed that you submitted an entry last year but have not done so yet this year. We value all of our submissions and hope to receive one from you this year. If you have any questions at all about the contest please let us know. If you are already working on an entry and plan to submit it soon please reply to this email and let us know so that we can be on the lookout for your submission. Thanks for your help and we look forward to hearing from you soon.
-The TaxSlayer Team”
So as early as April 6th, the taxslayer people knew they weren’t getting a lot of entries and they practically begged people to submit. They way I see it, they were begging people to jump on to a sinking ship. Once they started asking specific individuals to submit videos, I think they passed the point of no return. Doesn’t matter if they got 18 videos or 2 videos. They basically just gave up and told everyone “sorry you trusted us but you wasted your time.” They could have done lots of things to make sure they got more entries like extend the contest deadline. I think by April 6th, they saw the writing on the wall and knew the contest was going to be canceled. I think they knew that anyone submitting after receiving the april 6th e-mail was just going to be wasting their time.
This was a dick move on taxslayer’s part. I actually used taxslayer.com to file my taxes this year but I WILL NEVER USE TAXSLAYER AGAIN. If I can’t trust them to run a simple video contest right, how can I trust them with my taxes??