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

The Soprano Dorito vs. Skittles’ Singing Rabbit

Posted by Dan L. on November 30th, 2010

The Skittles Rabbit

I watch thousands of video contest entries every year and surprisingly I see very few obvious cases of plagiarism. I’m not sure if this means that most video contest filmmakers respect other people’s content or if it means that they’re just smart enough not to rip-off anything that’s recognizable.

But every so often I do see contestants trying to pass off stolen ideas as their own. And when I do see possible acts of plagiarism, I usually post it. Why? Because ripping off another filmmaker is wrong…but ripping off another filmmaker in an attempt to make money is despicable. It’s also straight up dumb. If you win, eventually someone will probably realize what you’ve done.

Obviously, there are different degrees of plagiarism and the line between “inspiration” and “theft” are different for everyone. While I might not see flat out plagiarism much in video contests I do see a lot of low-grade copying. By that I mean that non-professional actors will sometimes copy well-known characters or new writers will sometimes use lines they’ve heard somewhere before, (e.g., “That’s gonna leave a mark!”) That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me because almost all viewers will realize those bits were copied from well known works. Non-malicious copying is just something you can expect to see in videos created by young or new filmmakers.

But what does bother me is when professional (or aspiring professional) filmmakers consciously take ideas other people created, change them in the hopes that no one will recognize those ideas and then present a new work as if it was 100% original. And that brings me to the point of this post. The other day a reader sent me a link to a Doritos commercial that was submitted to the Crash the Super Bowl contest. He said he thought the idea was a rip-off of a Skittles commercial from a few years ago. I think he’s totally right. The entry in question is called “The Soprano Dorito.” It’s a pretty good ad and more than one person sent it to me and said they thought it was good enough for the finals. Here it is:
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And now here’s a Skittles commercial from 2006:
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Yeah, both of those ads feature a lot of big differences. But big differences don’t mean that the Doritos ad isn’t a rip off. I can maybe see how two filmmakers could independently come up with commercial ideas about a guy who finds/gets an opera singing creature that he soon gets sick of and has to think about getting rid of. But it’s the rainstorm scene in the Doritos video that seals the deal for me. It’s like an artistic artifact from the original work that survived the adaptation process. I guess it was just too perfect to leave out. In my opinion, the fact that regret-during-a-rainstorm scenes appear in the middle of both ads reveals that the person who created this CTSB entry didn’t just steal an idea, they copied the mood, pacing and story arc of the skittles ad.

The Soprano Dorito is an incredibly well made entry. It really does have a serious shot at making the CTSB finals. It looks amazing, the acting is good and the CGI is funny (in a good way.) On the CTSB site, the entry is credited to someone named Douglas Jessup. I googled him and according to his website, Jessup is about to graduate from USC with a masters in film production. Why do I bring that up? Because a guy like that should know better.

I can understand how some might think I’m over-reacting by outing a complete stranger like this but idea-thieves always deserve to be called on their actions. Because if they get away with it once, they’ll probably try again. If you ever come across a video contest entry that you believe plagiarizes another work, let me know at . Now if you’ll permit me a moment to cover my ass legally I’d like to point out that I have no direct proof that the makers of The Soprano Dorito plagiarized the skittles Singing Rabbit ad. The points made in this post are just conjecture. For all I know, the similarities in both ads could just be coincidences.

But one thing I do know for sure, that Dorito is a tenor, not a soprano.

12/1/10 UPDATE: A few people have left comments on the CTSB page for The Soprano Dorito saying they thought the entry was too similar to the Skittles Singing Rabbit ad. The director left this comment as a response:

“DouglasJessup: I wasn’t going to respond to the Skittles comments, but here: search “one froggy evening” – it’s an old WB cartoon. This was my inspiration…”

Frankly, I don’t buy that explanation. The Doritos entry contains too many important elements that appeared in the skittles ad but didn’t appear in . For example, in One Froggy Evening, the main character’s problem is that he can’t get the frog to sing when he wants it to. But in the Skittles ad, the main character’s problem is that the rabbit won’t STOP singing ever. The main character in The Soprano Dorito has the same problem as the main character in the Skittles ad. The Opera-singing Dorito, like the Opera-singing Skittles rabbit won’t STOP singing. The main character in One Froggy Evening tries to get rid of the frog because it won’t sing enough. The main characters in the Skittles and Doritos ads try and get rid of their creatures because they are being driven crazy by the non-stop singing.

One more thing; a reader said that I must have written this post because I was “feeling the heat” of a competing video. Just for the record, I did not enter the Doritos contest this year. So I have no dog in this fight. I’m just an observer who thinks filmmakers should respect other people’s ideas and content.

12/3/10 Update: Doug Jessup, the creator of The Soprano Dorito left a comment to this post and provided a link to a blog entry explaining why he thinks I’m an idiot (check the comments for the link.) If you ignore all the weird insults aimed at me, Jessup’s post kind of reads like a film school paper on how all great filmmakers copy ideas from one another. Jessup also goes to great lengths to IMPLY that he didn’t copy ideas from the skittles ad but he never actually comes out and says he did NOT use it as a source of “inspiration.”

A reader named Scott posted a handy definition of what Plagiarism is in the comments. To qualify as plagiarism an artist must “steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own,” “use (another’s production) without crediting the source,” and “present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”

After Jessup left his comment I left one of my own and asked him point blank, Yes or no, did he get any of the ideas for The Soprano Dorito from the Skittles Singing Rabbit ad. I can tell from my my web traffic logs that Jessup has checked the comments for this post many, many times in the last few days but he has not responded to my question. I think it is obvious that Jessup took ideas from the Singing Rabbit ad and because he is refusing to credit the ad as his source material and because he has gone to tremendous lengths to avoid citing his sources (creating a blog that implies he didn’t steal ideas from the Skittles ad without literally making that claim) I think this incident definitely qualifies as plagiarism.
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Our Top 30 Pepsi Max CTSB Contenders

Posted by Dan L. on November 22nd, 2010

The Crash the Super Bowl contest wound up receiving 1460 Pepsi Max commercials this year and man, I watched every single one of them. Ok…well, not really. I didn’t watch EVERY one of them. If you’ve scrolled through the CTSB contest site you’ll have noticed that there are tons and tons of duplicate entries. So many people uploaded multiple copies of the same video that I’d estimate that the actual number of unique entries is probably about 800. But full disclosure, I didn’t watch all 800 of those entries all the way through. I probably stopped watching about 50% of those 800 videos after 15 seconds. However, I do feel like I gave every video a fair shot. The reality of this contest is that filmmakers are supposed to be making commercials that are good enough to air on tv. So if I can’t hear the dialogue or see the action then it just has no realistic shot. No matter how awesomely hilarious an entry might be, production quality matters. But I’m no big-budget loving snob. In fact, I very much prefer ads that are less polished and have a more genuine, user-generated feel to them. The slickest ads actually turn me off because it feels like producers with deep pockets are just trying to spend their way into the finals. And that kind of defeats the “little guys get a shot at the big time” spirit of the competition.

So let’s assume that I watched about 400 entries from start to finish. As I was working my way through the contest gallery I would bookmark any submission that I thought was decent. What does “decent” mean? Well a “decent” entry doesn’t have any major technical problems, it doesn’t violate the rules and it has an ok story. So the “decent” entries didn’t even have to be funny. They just had to be ok. My thinking was that if there was any chance that some one, some where might like an ad, I’d bookmark it. That got me down to about 200 entries.

From there, I applied a kind of a bizarre test to the remaining ads. Let’s call it the “How the F#%& did THAT get on the Super Bowl!?” test. As I watched the 200 “decent” ads I tried to image how average folks would react to seeing this commercial for the first time in the middle of the big game. If I felt like more than 50% of viewers would think a video was too “lame” or “stupid” or “boring” to air during the Super Bowl it got cut from my list. I know that might sound of harsh but you gotta remember that the home audience will have about 2 seconds to decide whether or not they liked a commercial before the next one starts. So trying to predict viewers’ gut reactions is a pretty fair test, I think.

So that test got me down to about 60 videos. Yep, 60. In my opinion, out of the 1460 videos submitted, only 60 are good enough to have a real shot at actually making the finals. (that’s 4% by the way) Since I wound up with 60 possible contenders I decided to weed out half of them and present a Top 30 list. The list consists of what I think are the 25 strongest CTSB contenders plus 5 contenders that have issues that I suspect might keep them out of the finals. So how did I get down to the final 30? Well for each video I considered the following questions:

Based on how the Ad Meter works, does this spot have a chance at scoring well?
If people saw this ad on tv during the Super Bowl, would they like it enough to want to see it again later online?
Does this video fit the style of videos that the judges at Fritolay seem to like? (based on past finalist selections)
Is this the kind of ad that the big wigs at Pepsi, Doritos and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners said they’d be looking for in this year’s CTSB Launch video? (Goodby/Silverstein is an ad firm that helps fritolay judge the contest.)
Is it funny?

And those questions got me to my list of 30. Pepsi won’t announce their 5 finalist choices until January 3^rd but if I may be so bold, I’m gonna predict that all 5 of those finalist videos can be seen right now in this post.

But before I present the list, a major caveat!! At the last minute this year I wound up being part of a team that shot a Pepsi Max ad. I honestly didn’t have much faith that the video was going to work but I am absolutely amazed at how good the final version turned out to be. It’s so good that I absolutely had to include it in this post. Obviously I’m biased since I had a hand in making the thing but I give you folks my word that even if I had nothing to do with this ad, it would have made my list. Is this really a fair thing to me to do? I dunno, but it’s my blog so deal with it ya’ nerds! Ahem…ok, enough jibber jabber. Here’s our list of the Top 30 Pepsi Max Crash the Super Bowl contenders. The entries are listed in no particular order. Oh wait, they are. They’re in alphabetical order. Guess that counts as particular. Click on the thumbnails to see the actual videos.

TOP 25 CONTENDERS IN THE PEPSI MAX CRASH THE SUPER BOWL CONTEST:

ASSEMBLY REQUIRED:

CAR SEAT:

DOG GONE:

DON’T WASTE IT:

GO LONG:

HICCUPS:

JOIN HANDS FOR PEACE:

LAUNCH PAD:

LOVE HURTS:

MAGIC MAX:

METEOR DOG/METEOR HERO:

NO COUNTRY CLUB FOR OLD MEN:

OVER THE POP:

PEPSI MAX IS MAGNUS:

PEPSI MAX TASTE TEST:

PEPSI WEDDING:

THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE:

THE CHOICE:

THE LEGEND OF MOOSEY JOE:

THE WRESTLER:

THIRD WISH:

TORPEDO COOLER:

THROWING PEPSI:

TURF WAR:

WHO WANTS ONE?:

So my goal was to list the 25 ads that I feel have the best shot at going all the way. But I wanted to point out 5 more videos that Pepsi will almost certainly give serious consideration to. These final 5 videos however, as good as they are, have issues; issues I believe will keep them out of the finals. These entries are so noteworthy and so professional-looking though that if I left them off the list people would think I was a moron. For each I’ll explain the extenuating circumstances that I suspect will keep these spots from making the final 5. Now when you see this list you might be inclined to think that I’m just picking on the most expensive and slickest entries. But keep in mind that I cut dozens of videos from my list of contenders for all kinds of crazy reasons. The only reason I am including these entries in this list is because they are so GOOD they can’t be ignored and I feel like I should explain why they didn’t make the cut.

WHISTLE TO THE MAX. This is one of the most amazing video contest entries I have ever seen. As a piece of filmmaking it is just fantastic. I can’t even imagine how the director pulled it off. Did he just happen to be in Africa with enough production gear to shoot a small film? How did they get all those kids? The whole thing is amazing. But you can’t ignore the fact that it features original music and the CTSB rules make a big deal about that. Contestants were not allowed to create new music. They could only use the tracks provided by the sponsors. You could argue that whistling and tapping don’t constitute a “song” but the video’s description actually says “in a village in Eastern Africa, the local kids make music using Pepsi bottles” And on top of that, the melody of the bottle song actually mimics the Pepsi theme song.

TOOL FIGHT. Not counting this year, the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest has been held 3 other times. The first year, a team of filmmakers known as 5 Points Productions won the contest. The second year, a pair of brothers named Joe and Dave Herbert won and received a million dollar bonus. The third year, the 5 Points production team “won” the contest (and $600K) again. So what does all that have to do with this entry? Well it was created by the 2009 champs the Herbert Brothers. Tool Fight is a great entry and even looks like a Super Bowl commercial. But Pepsi is really, really, REALLY going to have to love it in order for them to be able to pick it. If the same people keep winning the contest every year are filmmakers going to want to keep entering? And to make matters even more sticky, the Herbert Brothers are essentially spokesmen for the Crash the Super Bowl contest. I don’t think they’re currently getting paid for their efforts but an entire section of the CTSB website is filled with “How to” videos featuring advice and tips from the Herberts. How would it look if the guys hired by Fritolay to teach contestants how to win this contest won this contest? The brothers are great guys and readers of the site and they’ve even been sharing their insiders’ perspective in the comment section of some of our recent posts. So I do feel like kind of a jerk for bringing all this up. But the truth of the matter is that history and appearances will have an impact of this video’s chances.

OFFICE BREAK. If I were to see this commercial on TV I’d never suspect it was created as an entry for a user-generated video contest. It’s very slick, the actors are funny and the final gag is pretty ingenious. But something is not right here. This ad features a number of professional actors including three especially awesome writers/actors who, over the years have played countless characters on Conan O’Brian’s various talk shows. (they’re the big lady, the red headed instigator and the guy in the wrestling shorts) So when I first saw Office Break I assumed that it was made by someone who works on the staff of the Conan O’Brian’s show. Or maybe even the ENTIRE Conan staff and crew. But it wasn’t. Turns out this spot was created by a filmmaker named Kevin Wilson. Last year, his CTSB entry “Casket” made it to the Doritos finals and aired during the Super Bowl. Since the creators of this spot don’t have anything to do with Conan (the show) I think it was inappropriate to cast so many recognizable members of Conan’s staff. It gives the false impression that Conan or his team wrote and filmed this spot. If this ad airs during the super bowl, tens of millions of people will jump to the same conclusions that I did…and that includes any die-hard Conan fans that might happen to be in USA Today’s Ad Meter focus group. Who knows, maybe Conan himself okayed this but regardless, it comes across as a calculated attempt to imply something about the people who wrote this ad that isn’t true.

MAXIMUM BORGNINE. Ok so first off, this ad looks like a million bucks. Plus holy F%&$! That’s Ernest Borgine! And that guy from Baseketball and Orgazmo! How in world did they get those guys to be in a Crash the Super Bowl entry!? Color me hella impressed. However….if Pepsi selects this ad for the finals they will basically be throwing the entire Crash The Super Bowl concept out the window. Yes, I’m serious. If this entry had an anonymous old man in it every one would just dismiss it as yet another “old person gone wild” type of video. Other than the top-notch production values the only thing that makes this spot special is that the old guy running around screaming is a celebrity. And if Pepsi cared about having celebrities in their ads they wouldn’t be seeking out “User Generated content.” If this ad gets to the finals, Pepsi and Doritos will essentially be telling the thousands of low budget filmmakers who enter the contest every year “This is what it takes to win; a celebrity.” And there’s no way the Borgnine spot would NOT make it to the Super Bowl. After all, it’d be the only Crash the Super Bowl entry that the media would care about. But you know what viewers will think when the spot airs? They’ll think “what are they doing, trying to do their own version of the Betty White Snickers ad?”

ALIEN. Ok, enough of my jealous bitching. Let’s end on a happy note. This spot is called Alien and it is my personal favorite out of all 1460 Pepsi Max submissions. I won’t spoil the surprise but the first joke in this video cracks me up every time I see it. In fact, this is one of the only Pepsi Max entries that actually made me laugh out loud. I also think it’s a perfect example of true “User-Generated” content. You get the feeling that these two dudes were sitting around one day drinking Pepsi Max when they came up with this idea. Then they grabbed a camera and a cucumber and went outside to film the thing. It goes to show that you can literally spend zero dollars on your ad but if the script is funny you’ll get noticed. If you’ve watched Alien you’re probably going to guess that I’m going to say the video quality isn’t good enough for tv. Pshhht. Forget video quality. A good colorist could make this ad tv-ready in a single session. No the problem here is the news broadcast that the bearded guy is listening to at the start of the ad. That’s part of Orson Well’s infamous 1938 War of the World’s Broadcast! So…that’ll probably will hinder their chances a bit.

Ok folks, that’s our list. Like I said I did work on one of the above videos so take everything I’ve said here with a grain of salt. Now before anyone asks, no I will not be doing a list like this for the Doritos entries. If I tried to watch any more CTSB entries my brain would melt. And for the record, if your video didn’t make our Top 30 list it does NOT mean it wasn’t any good. It just means that it didn’t fit my cockamamie theories about what the Crash the Super Bowl judges will be looking for. If you want to yell at me or if you want to post your own list of favorite entries, please do so in the comments.

Ok…send us your best Doritos ads!

Posted by Dan L. on November 17th, 2010

About 2 weeks ago I announced that I planned on doing a list of our Top Picks for the best Pepsi Max entries to the Crash the Super Bowl contest. I asked you guys to send me links to your favorite videos (or videos you made that you’re especially proud of) and a whole lot of you took me up on the offer. And even though I didn’t ask for them, I’ve been getting lots and lots of links to Doritos entries. So I’ve decided I should stop ignoring the Doritos folks and start a new discussion thread. So if you have a Doritos entry you’d like to promote, leave the link as a comment to this post. Since there were more than 3,000 doritos commercials submitted to the Crash this year I won’t be able to do a list of my top picks. But if I see an entry I really like I might feature it.

UPDATE: I’m happy to look at any videos anyone wants to send me and I’ll even give you a quick review if you’d like one, but my inbox is getting pretty messy. So please don’t e-mail me your links. Post them in a comment so that everyone can see them.

So how many entries did the Crash the Super Bowl contest get?

Posted by Dan L. on November 16th, 2010

Your last chance to submit your entries for the 2010/2011 installment of the big, annual Crash the Super Bowl contest was last night at midnight. So hopefully you all got your Doritos and/or Pepsi Max commercials done on time. If you missed the cut off, don’t be disappointed; just think of it like you’re already set to submit to next year’s contest!

According to an announcement on the CTSB forum, it might take up to 48 hours for the last minute uploads to appear on the site. But already it’s clear this Crash was the biggest yet. Last year, Doritos received about 4,000 submissions. Right now the combined total for Doritos and Pepsi Max entries is 5720. (note: Numbers updated on 11/24 to reflect the last minute ads that were finally approved.) So which product did filmmakers prefer? Well as of right now, here’s what we’ve got:

Doritos entries: 4260

Pepsi entries: 1460

So Doritos wins in a landslide. But as I mentioned in a previous post, this year I’m mostly interested in the Pepsi Max competition since it’s the first year Pepsi’s been a part of the Crash. A few weeks ago I decided to try and watch at least a few seconds of every, single Pepsi Max ad that was submitted to this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest. And I’ve actually managed to do it. I’ve been bookmarking all the good submissions I see and next Monday I’m going to post a list of what I think are the 25 best Pepsi Max ads.

But I could use some help with this bizarre task. So if you’ve seen a really great Pepsi Max ad that deserves a spot on our Top 25 list, send it to us! Hell, I don’t even care if you made the ad you send. As long as its good, I want to see it. If you have a link you want to share, leave it in a comment to this post.

For now I’m going to post links to two particularly noteworthy ads. The first got my attention because it’s full of recognizable faces. It features two writers from Conan O’Brian’s staff that often play different characters on his show. Both those guys are awesome. And according to some of the comments on the video one actress is a regular in videos produced by The Onion and another girl was a “hottie” on that show The Good Guys a few weeks back.

Office Break- Pepsi Max:

I can't embed videos from the CTSB site so click to view.

The final gag at the end of the video is ingenious but I don’t know…the ad as a whole just doesn’t really grab me. It seems like it was produced by someone with deep pockets (deep compared to 99.99% of CTSB contestants) and money and production values were used to cover up a weak script. In a weird way, I think this entry is actually hurt by the fact that they used a recognizable cast. It seems like a lot of effort with only a small pay off. To me at least, ads that try to “spend” their way into the finals are a real turn off. UPDATE: Oh wow. I assumed this ad was made by someone who worked at the Conan O’Brian show. But it turns out this entry was created by a filmmaker named Kevin Willson. His entry last year made it to the final 6 and aired during the 2010 Super Bowl. It didn’t score high enough on the Ad Meter to get a bonus but Wilson won a $25,000 finalist prize.

Tool Fight:

Again, click to view

That’s a very high-quality submission and you’ll notice that the name of the featured construction company is “Herbert Construction.” There’s nothing to confirm this 100% but it seems pretty likely that this ad was created by 2009 Crash the Super Bowl champs, The Herbert Brothers. They’re the guys who won a million bucks after their brilliant “Free Doritos” commercial was rated the best ad of the entire 2009 Super Bowl. I had seen them doing a promotional video for this year’s Crash and they seemed very excited about submitting a Pepsi Max ad this year. Plus it features a nut shot which is definitely their style. AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Yep, this ad for sure was made by the Herbert Brothers. It even features one of the actors from their famous . If the Herbert Brothers make to the finals again, this will be their third trip to the Super Bowl. Besides “Free Doritos” they also won $10,000 for making it to the finals the first year Doritos ran the Crash with a video called .

Anyways, remember to check back next Monday to see our picks for the Top 25 and if you’ve seen an ad we need to include, let us know! UPDATE: I’m happy to look at any videos anyone wants to send me and I’ll even give you a quick review if you’d like one, but my inbox is getting pretty messy. So please don’t e-mail me your links. Post them in a comment so that everyone can see it.

Feel Your Boobies winner

Posted by Dan L. on November 11th, 2010

There was a video contest about boobies and I missed it!? WTF!? Man, I’m slipping. Anyway, this contest was called “Feel Your Boobies” and filmmakers were supposed to create funny videos encouraging women to floss more. I kid of course. The point was to get women to feel their boobs to help prevent breast cancer. The grand prize winner was picked via public vote. 88 entries were submitted and according to the contest site, more than 30,000 votes were cast. Wow. 88 people all vying for one $10,000 prize? My God…that must have been brutal. Now I’m glad I missed this contest. I don’t know if there were voting shenanigans or not but the winning video is actually pretty funny. It’s worth watching even though it’s boob-free.

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $10,000

Help us find the best Pepsi Max CTSB entries!

Posted by Dan L. on November 8th, 2010

Stare as long as you'd like, the number ain't gonna change

The real countdown clock on Crashthesuperbowl.com actually like...counts down.

Today is Monday, November 8th which means there’s just one week left to submit to Doritos’/Pepsi Max’s Crash the Superbowl contest. If you haven’t shot your entry by now you should really get your ass in gear already. As for me, I’m starting to realize I’ll probably have to skip the contest this year. I did have one idea I was working on but the whole thing kind of fell apart. Maybe I’ll get my act together and shoot this weekend but yeah…probably not. Oh well. At least I can enjoy the contest from the sidelines.

Last year was the first time ever that I actually paid attention to The Crash the Super Bowl contest. To make up for lost time I decided to try and watch as many entries as I could, list my favorites and then try and predict a winner. But surprise! Doritos wound up getting more than 4,000 entries in 2009! (Twice as many as 2008) That means it would have taken me more than 33 hours to watch them all! I gave it my best but I only managed to watch about two or three thousand of them…and when I say “watch” I mean I watched at least 3 seconds before hitting the next button. 90% of the time you can tell if an ad has any shot as soon as it starts playing.

To help me pick up the slack I asked our readers to submit their favorite ads. And you guys sent me a ton of them. Thanks to your contributions I got a pretty in-depth view of the best work that had been submitted. After sorting through all those videos, this is the one I predicted as the winner on December 18th:

And here’s what I said about it: “If it were up to me, this spot right here would get the first spot in the top 6. It’s funny, new, unique, subversive and it even manages to look and sound like a professional ad… So here’s Beardy’s big prediction; Animal Cruelty will make the top 6, it will make it to the Superbowl and it will place in the Top 3 of the USA Today Ad meter poll. It has just what it takes to rank well during polling. It’s funny early and gets funnier as it goes on. As soon as viewers see that shot of that dog lifting up his collar, every dial in the ad meter poll will go all the way to “This is great” and it will stay there for the rest of the spot.”

And guess what? I totally nailed it!! “Animal Cruelty” was renamed “Underdog” and not only did Doritos pick it for the Top 6, they chose to air it first during the 2010 Super Bowl. It was the highest rated Doritos ad of the night and was the second highest ad of the entire game which means its creators won a whopping $600,000 bonus from Frito-Lay.

So I’m feeling kinda cocky this time around and I want to see if I can call the winner again. But this is the forth year that Doritos has let fans create their Super Bowl ads for them and to be honest, I think the concept has kind of run its course. I tried watching some of this year’s entries and it’s just the same gags over and over and over. If I have to see one more commercial where a fat guy lays in a bed with his nakedness covered by chips in an attempt to seduce his suspiciously hot wife I’m going to lose my appetite for Doritos forever. So this year, Video Contest News will be focusing most of it’s Crash the Super Bowl attention on what’s new; Pepsi Max. As you probably know, this year consumers can create Crash the Superbowl ads for either Doritos or Pepsi Max. Pepsi/Fritolay will select 5 ads for each product and then 3 commercials for each will wind up airing during the big game in February.

So forget Dortios…been there, watched that. This time we are looking for the BEST Pepsi Max ads. After the deadline passes (and after I have a chance to watch as many entries as I can) we will announce VCN’s official picks. I think this time, instead of trying to predict an ultimate winner we will pick 5 entries that we think will take the Top 5 finalists spots.

As of right now, only 196 Pepsi Max ads have been submitted compared to 497 Doritos ads. So I’m guessing there will be about…um, like 3,500 Doritos entries and 1700 Pepsi Max entries. (seriously it’s really hard to come up with a good idea for a diet soda commercial…but if you’re reading this I bet you’ve already realized that.) 1700 entries is a whole lot less than 4000 but it’s still a lot of viewing time. So once again, I need your help! If you see a Pepsi Max entry that is totally, mind-blowingly amazing, let me know! And yes, self-promotion is allowed. If you happened to make an entry that you honestly believe has a shot at winning, send it to me.

You can leave a link to your favorite ads as a comment to this post or you can e-mail them to be at .

UPDATE: Just for the heck of it, I’m going to come back to this post every day or so and update the number of entries in the CTSB contest. The number is still managable but the totals should probably start to skyrocket on Friday.

2010 Crash the Super Bowl entries:

November 8: Pepsi Max: 196 Doritos: 497

November 10: Pepsi Max: 211 Doritos: 580

November 11: Pepsi Max: 302 Doritos: 684

November 12: Pepsi Max: 360 Doritos: 849

November 13: Pepsi Max: 461 Doritos: 1150

November 15: Pepsi Max: 714 Doritos: 1926

November 16: Pepsi Max: 1056 Doritos: 3013

Voting begins in Sprint’s “Epic” video contest

Posted by Dan L. on November 4th, 2010

Like I said a few posts back I haven’t entered a video contest that used public-votes to determine its winners in quite a while because those type of contests almost always devolve into chaos. And it’s also been a while since I did a post about another filmmaker’s attempts to win a vote-based contest. But long-time VCN reader Tim O. sent me link to his entry in Sprint’s “Epic Contest” and it’s so good it deserves a plug.

The Epic Contest is actually using a vote-based contest model that I don’t mind so much; voters pick a bunch of finalists and then those finalists go on to be judged by the sponsor. Well that’s the way it normally works. In this case, 10 finalists are screened by Captain Explosion, AKA Michael Bay and he picks one, $25,000 winner. Videos submitted to this contest where supposed to be epic in nature. Here’s Tim O.’s entry. To view it and vote for him, just click this image.

Click here to see a seriously epic contest entry

That was so tight it’s disgusting. It looks like “Epic Fall” is one of the top rated videos at the moment and if it makes it to the top 10 I think Mr. Bay will be hard pressed to choose a better winner. Plus it’s got smashing concrete and slow motion in it and that dude loves that shit.

The contest website records your IP address so you’re only able to vote once per day. It’s a pretty effective system. But apparently, this contest was beset by a lot of other problems. A LOT of people assumed that “epic” was code for “violent” and went out and shot graphic action scenes. But those folks all broke the #1 rule of video contest filmmaking; they didn’t read the rules before they started working on their entries. The rules state that videos “must not depict any dangerous activities or situations.” And here’s a bigger chunk of the rules:

“Submissions cannot communicate messages or images inconsistent with the positive images and/or goodwill to which Sponsor wishes to associate. Sponsor, judges reserve the right, in their sole discretion, to disqualify any Submission that, in their sole opinion, refers, depicts or in any way reflects negatively upon the Sponsor, the Contest or any other person or entity, or does not comply with these requirements or these Official Rules”

So all the eager beavers out there that shot action-filled, Bad Boys-esque shoot ‘em ups wound up having their videos disqualified. At least you have the chance to learn from their mistakes. Remember, always read the rules before you shoot. I know most contest rules read like but you have to read them. Because you can’t win a contest if you don’t make a legitimate entry, now can you?

What do YOU think about the big Godaddy winners?

Posted by Dan L. on November 2nd, 2010

Man oh man…I think I really overdid things this weekend. So much candy…so much beer…so much wig hair clinging to my face. (i was a viking.) I got so sidetracked by halloween that I’ve totally been slacking on covering one of the biggest pieces of Video Contest News of the year; the announcement of the winners of Godaddy.com’s massive summer video contest. Readers have been asking me if I was going to comment on the results and I will…but just not until after I re-cooperate a bit. (I had a shoot yesterday and today so I’m really backlogged on my re-cooperating.) Anyways, a friend of the site suggested that I do a new post so that readers could share their thoughts about the winning godaddy videos. I think that’s an awesome idea so that’s what I’m doing right now.

So click the link below and watch all the winning ads. Then come back here to share your thoughts, complaints, jealous rantings etc. in the comment section of this post. Like I’ve said, I’ll have more to say about the contest soon so look for a more detailed post to come in a couple days.

http://videos.godaddy.com/godaddy-commercial-contest.aspx

UPDATE: As I mentioned last week (when we totally got it right when we announced the leaked name of the winning godaddy entry) I really like the first place winning commercial Russell’s Notebook. It was easily the best video submitted. Our pals over at my favorite website onlinevideocontests.com did an interview with the Russell’s Notebook team. Check it out to learn how they were able to pull off such an ambitious and cool entry:

UPDATE #2: Oh wow. I just checked our traffic logs and VCN got a record number of visitors during the month of October! Thanks to the interest in the godaddy contest, October’s traffic just barely beat out January’s when we got a ton of Crash the Superbowl-related traffic. If you’re new to the site, thanks for visiting! If you like what you see, why not bookmark us or subscribe to our RSS feed?