Ok, color me impressed. The deadline to submit to the Pillsbury “Crescent meals” commercial contest was May 10th. But all four winning entries were announced on the contest site, Zooppa.com just one week later. One…week…later.

Anyone who’s entered a video contest before understands why that’s amazing. Video contest results usually take for-freaking-ever to be announced! I’m still waiting to hear about one contest I entered that had a submission deadline in mid-March. That lightning fast Pillsbury announcement becomes even more impressive when you consider that Zooppa received 84 entries for this competition. Sure, each video was only 15 seconds long but that’s still a ton of videos to go through. And Pillsbury actually plans to air the first place video on TV so they couldn’t have made their decision lightly. I saw something on the Zooppa message board that seemed to indicate that most of their contest results are posted really, really soon after their deadlines pass.  One of the most frustrating things about video contests is that we filmmakers are expected to deliver our work by a pre-designated deadline but sponsors usually have no obligation to announce results by a specific date. If I’m going to lose a contest, I’d like to know as soon as possible. Finding out that you lost a contest after 2 months of waiting and wondering and hoping really, really sucks so it’s nice to see a contest site that makes fast results announcements a priority.

Here’s the ad that won the Pillsbury contest. The rules for this one were tight. Each video could only be 15 seconds long and the ad had to show “mom as a character” and include shots of “Pillsbury crescent dogs.” The winning ad is pretty good so I think the quality of this video might have made the decision easy for Pillsbury:

First Place. Prize: $10,000 and ad will air on TV

$5,000 in other prizes were given to 3 runners up. You can see all the winners here:

http://blog.zooppa.com/2010/05/17/pillsbury-winners-cherrish-tomorrow-2/