2011 June | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

They Might be Giants announces music video contest

Posted by Dan L. on June 27th, 2011

They Might Be Giants is one of my favorite bands so I had to post this. Today the group announced that they’re running a music video contest to correspond with the release of their new album, Join Us. The prize is $1,000 and a pizza from the pizzeria of the winners’ choice. Sure, that’s not a big prize but this isn’t the kind of contest you enter because of the money. This is the kind of contest you enter for the GLORY of winning. In a weird twist, John Hodgeman will be the one and only judge of this competition. So if you can manage to win a They Might Be Giants music video contest that is judged by John Hodgeman, you’re guaranteed rock solid nerd cred for life. For the full contest details, check out what is probably the best contest announcement video I’ve ever seen:

Chevy wants to air your video during the Super Bowl!

Posted by Dan L. on June 22nd, 2011

The start of this year’s NFL season is still 3 months away but this morning at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, Chevrolet announced they would be airing 5 commercials during Super Bowl XLVI in February…and one of those ads will be a 30 to 60 second long, consumer-generated “short film” about the spirit of the open road. So get ready folks because Chevy is “Crashing” the 2012 Super Bowl!

But unlike Doritos’ annual “Crash the Superbowl” contest, Chevy will not be running this promotion themselves. Instead, the Chevy competition will be hosted and run by the video contest website, Mofilm. In fact, this morning’s big announcement was made at the Mofilm seminar in Cannes.

Surprisingly, this is going to be a GLOBAL video contest so you don’t need to be a US citizen to enter. The contest will be run in two stages; the Script phase and the Video phase. You have the option of submitting to either or both phases. So if you don’t submit a script, you can still shoot a video. Here’s what Mofilm and Chevy are asking screenwriters to do:

The script for your film should be an epic road trip story or adventure that captures the spirit of Route 66 and Chevrolet! The top five scripts will win serious cash. We will provide feedback on all scripts which will give you a jump start should you decide to produce a video in Round Two.

Yes, you read that correctly. The sponsors will give feedback on ALL scripts that are submitted. That’s huge! It means that anyone who submits to the script phase will have a tremendous advantage when it comes time to shoot their video. There are 5 cash prizes in the script competition ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. Once the script competition ends, a new contest brief for the Video Phase will be launched on September 1st.

If your entry is selected as the winner of the Video Phase, your short will air during the Super Bowl and you’ll receive $25,000. And while this hasn’t been officially announced yet, the folks at Mofilm tell me that the winner will also get a trip to the Big Game.

So how the heck do you win? Well, the winners will be picked by a mix of public voting and judge’s decisions. However, Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer at General Motors told The New York Times that while votes will “have a great deal of influence,” the “final say” will be his. So I think we need to wait for the official rules before we know how the winners will actually be chosen. But I’m very glad to hear that votes alone will not determine the winner.

All of this is really exciting news. Last year, Pepsi Max and Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest recived more than 5,000 entries and they aired 6 user-made ads. Getting something to air during the SuperBowl would be an amazing accomplishment but a 6 in 5,000 shot aren’t very appealing odds. So if you’re going to enter one HUGE video contest this year, “Route 66″ might be your best bet. I personally am going to make the Chevy Super Bowl contest my top priority for the second half of 2011. The deadline to enter is December 1st but I think I’m going to get to work on this ASAP. The contest was literally just announced like an hour ago so not all of the pertinent info is up on the site yet. But if you want to get a jump on the competition, follow the link below:

Chevrolet Route 66: Super Bowl competition: http://www.mofilm.com/chevroletroute66

PurpleBot: FOR THE WIN!

Posted by Dan L. on June 17th, 2011

Video “assignments” that are run on websites like Poptent, Tongal and Zooppa are great because the sponsors often use the purchased/winning submissions as actual pieces of advertising. But personally I still love straight up, old school video contests. (By “old school” I mean the kind of contests companies were running all of 2 years ago.) I’m talking about the type of thing where a company runs a contest kind of just for fun and invites their fans and customers to submit videos. When people aren’t worried about creating brand-appropriate commercials they’re free to go crazy and do some really goofy stuff. Case in point, Royal Purple’s Reel Wars video contest. RP got some really off-the-wall submissions for this one. I especially liked that made the finals. I figured a beautiful russian girl + a cool car + a baby duck would = a win. But Here’s the video that came out on top:

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $5,000.

Boosh! Yep, that was and man and I happy to be the winner. Royal Purple really ran a great contest. Even though they got more than 40 entries, RP promised to give every contestant a case of Royal Purple motor oil or a $100 worth of merchandise from their online store. That is a really classy move. It shows contestants that you actually appreciate the time and effort they put into making their entries. And Royal Purple even said they want to set up an interview with me and one of the judges where he’ll present me with a giant novelty check. No joke: Receiving a giant novelty check is one of my Life Goals! So I guess I can cross that particular item the bucket list.

Well, I’m going to do some celebrating this weekend, that’s for sure. Have a happy Friday everybody. But heads up…be sure to check back here early next week. We’re going to be announcing a MAJOR piece of video contest news in a few days. I can’t talk about it yet because I’m under a press embargo. (My second this week!) But I will tell you this, it’s a really SUPER piece of news. I’m not sure yet when the embargo will be lifted but it should be Wednesday at the latest.

A weird Epilogue to the Jackson Hewitt contest

Posted by Dan L. on June 15th, 2011

In late May I was contacted by a reader who had made the finals of Jackson Hewitt’s “Win Win with the Big Check” video contest. He said that he and the other finalists had been waiting for weeks and weeks to find out who had won and he was worried that JH wasn’t going to pay out the promised prize of two, $10,000 checks. Jackson Hewitt had recently declared bankruptcy and suddenly the rules for the contest disappeared from the web and the folks at JH stopped responding to the finalists’ calls and e-mail. On May 30th I did a post about Jackson Hewitt’s failure to pick a winner in this contest. One of the finalists sent the story to Jackson Hewitt and in just a few hours, the company announced the would reveal the winner on June 9th. And that’s just what they did. .

So all’s well that ends well, right? Not exactly. Last week, before the winners were announced I got some angry comments from someone who claimed to be one of the winners in this contest. She told me the checks had been cashed and that I was just being “pissy” and a sore loser because I didn’t win. Of course, I didn’t actually enter this contest so I had no stake in the outcome. I was just reporting some Video Contest News.

When the results were announced, Jackson Hewitt posted of the winners receiving their checks. I wanted to see if the name on one of the checks matched the person who sent me the angry comment. It did, but when I zoomed in, I noticed something else:

The winners got their giant checks on May 20th. That was 9 whole days before I did my post saying Jackson Hewitt had failed to pick a winner in this contest! Man do I feel like a jerk!

But wait a minute…to get all those people together for the photo I bet the winners were notified sometime in mid-May. So why the heck did Jackson Hewitt keep the news secret for a whole month? By delaying the announcement, Jackson Hewitt let the 19 other finalists think they still had a shot at winning for about 5 weeks! That sucks, man! Why did they let those people hold out hope for so long? And when Jackson Hewitt announced they would reveal the winner on June 9th, they already knew who won. So why did they have to wait until June 9th to make the announcement?

If I hadn’t done a post about it, I don’t think they ever would have announced that a winner had been chosen. The only explanation I can think of is that Jackson Hewitt was trying to keep the results quiet because of their bankruptcy. The winners recived their check on May 20th and on May 23rd Jackson Hewitt filed for Chapter 11 protection. I guess you can’t announce both of those pieces of news on the same day. Someone at the company must have realized that the people they owed money to might get upset if they discovered JH had enough cash to pay out contest prizes but not enough to pay their rent. So that’s probably why they put off announcing the winner until June 9th. They had to wait for some of the sting of the bankruptcy announcement to wear off. I guess that’s understandable but the whole thing was handled pretty badly. If you’re holding a video contest you should at least have the decency to tell the non-winners that a winner has been picked so they can get on with their lives. But from what I’ve been told, Jackson Hewitt has still not bothered to let the other finalists know the contest is over! I guess JH is just assuming they’ll find out the bad news next time they check the contest page for updates. And that’s a really uncool move. I’m sure things are pretty crazy over at Jackson Hewitt’s HQ these days but that’s no excuse not to treat their contestants with the respect they deserve.

UPDATE: A very astute reader suggested an explanation that should have been obvious to me; What if Jackson Hewitt just back-dated the giant check to 3 days before the company went bankrupt? It just seems far-fetched that they’d pick a winner in early May and then wait a month before announcing the results. The company declared bankruptcy on May 23rd and the checks say May 20th on them. I just checked and may 23rd was a monday. So those checks were dated to the last business day before JH went bankrupt.

A look at Gain’s Smell like a Million Bucks contest

Posted by Dan L. on June 13th, 2011

In the entire history of online video contests, no company has ever offered a one million dollar prize. Yeah sure, two teams of filmmakers have won million dollar prizes in Dorito’s Crash the Super Bowl contest, but those prizes weren’t guaranteed. They were bonuses for scoring the #1 spot on the USA Today Super Bowl ad meter. So there has never been a real, “million dollar video contest”….until now. On May 18th, Gain detergent launched the “” video contest. Can you guess what the prize is? Yep…one million dollars. Well, 10 annual payments of $100,000 to be more precise. According to Gain, this is the first time they’ve ever run with such a huge prize. So why did they choose to do this promotion as a video contest? Well I got to do an e-mail interview with the friendly folks at Gain and here’s what they told me:

Gain consumers are so passionate about Gain, they love interacting with the brand in high engagement ways. We want to celebrate our fans and their loyalty, so what better way to do it than to run a contest that truly showcased our fans in a visual way – so we could see them, hear their voice and celebrate their passion for our brand.

But Gain’s not just going to give away a million bucks for nothing. If you want to have a shot at the top prize you’ve gotta get creative and do a little work. To enter, you need to shoot a video that is 60 seconds or less that illustrates how Gain detergent helps keep your clothes smelling great. You even need to include the phrase “I use Gain and I smell like a million bucks!” for your entry to count.

All entries need to be uploaded to Gain’s Facebook page. Gain will pick 25 finalists based on 2 factors: a Creative Score and number of views. Getting a “view” isn’t all that easy though. For a view to count, a unique person must watch your video all the way through from beginning to end. And a person can only “view” a video one time a day. So if you want to boost your view count you’re going to have to really promote your entry hard on facebook.

Next, Gain will pick 25 finalists and then they will open up the field to a public vote. Whichever video gets the most votes wins the million dollar prize. That’s pretty heavy. If you’ve ever entered a vote-based video contest before you know how brutal they can be. Every vote-based video contest I have entered in the last two years ended suspiciously. It seems that a lot of people just can’t resist the urge to cheat…probably because it’s so easy to do in an online vote. And with a million bucks up for grabs, I’m a little worried that this contest might turn into an all-out cheating war.

A lot of contest sponsors simply don’t care if cheaters win. Apparently it’s just too much trouble to figure out if someone won an Ipad or a thousand bucks fair and square. But when $1,000,000 is at stake, the sponsor has no choice but to care. A Million Dollars isn’t an $800 Ipad. If a finalist creates a bunch of facebook accounts and votes for his or her own video a few hundred (or a few thousand) times they’d be committing a MAJOR crime. Seriously, it would be a million dollar fraud. A person would probably do jail time for something like that. But to Gain’s credit, they seem to be genuinely concerned about cheating. I’ve read a lot of video contest rules and it’s amazing how sometimes some companies don’t even explicitly prohibit self-voting. But Gain lays down the law in their official rules:

Any attempt by the Entrant and/or his/her family/friends to vote more than the number of times authorized herein, using any third party proxy voting services, using multiple names or e-mail addresses and/or any other fraudulent mechanism(s), including robotic, automatic, programmed or similar methods, shall give the Sponsor, in its sole discretion, the right to disqualify the Entrant’s Entry.

I asked Gain if they were concerned that one of their finalists might try and cheat. Here’s what they told me:

We always run contests with safeguards in mind to assure the contest is run with integrity and lawfully. Gain takes such contests very seriously and puts many measures in place to ensure the outcome is legitimate and appropriate.

Gain also confirmed that they will verify the votes before officially declaring a winner. So, it seems like this should be a tightly run contest. If you’re thinking of entering you better get moving. The deadline is still 24 days away but already 100 entries have been submitted! And some of them are pretty good. Even the Barenaked Ladies submitted an entry!!

Ok, maybe that was shot just to promote the contest.

This is a pretty interesting competition so I’m going to be following it closely. So stay tuned for updates. If any of you VCN readers submit an entry, send me the link and maybe I can post it or tweet it and help you get some views.

Hornito’s Mariachi Mash-Up winner

Posted by Dan L. on June 10th, 2011

For Hornito’s Mariachi-Mash up contest, bands were asked to cover 1 of 5 pre-approved rock songs like The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie or Surrender by Cheap Trick. But…the covers had to be done in the style of a Mariachi Band. Judges alone would pick the winner and they would rate entries based on the following criteria: Creativity (50%) Quality (25%) and Overall Fun (25%). The prize they put up was pretty good; $10,000 cash plus an interview with Billboard magazine. It sounded like a fun contest to me but it turned out that very few bands thought it would be worth their time to enter. It looks like Hornito’s only recived 8 entries and that was after a deadline extension. Here’s the video that wound up winning:

Winner. Prize: $10,000 and an interview with Billboard

Ok, I thought that was pretty cute. It was simple but the band did a nice job of composing a “Mariachi Mash-Up.” But now that you’ve seen the winner, check out this entry that DIDN’T WIN:

Holy Shit, that was ridiculous! I thought the opening was kind of over-kill but that was still one of the best video contest entries I have ever seen. Whoever directed did a hell of a job. For example, a less experienced director would have had the drummer wear his Mexican wrestler mask throught the entire video. But this director saved that gag until near the end. I’ve directed a few low budget music videos and you can’t blow your visual wad in the first 30 seconds. You have to keep showing the viewer something new to keep them interested.

But anyway, back to the contest. So what happened here? Why did a simple, one-shot video beat out a mariachi masterpiece? Well I think the answer is obvious. As awesome as it was, the second video wasn’t a “Mariachi Mash up!” The video had a great Mariachi look but other than one shout of “arribba!” the band just did a straight cover of Surrender. They missed the entire point of the whole contest.

So…let this be a lesson to you. No matter how insanely good your contest entries are, you’re not going to win if you don’t give the sponsors what they ask for.

Dairy Queen’s “Mini Blizzard Treatment” winners

Posted by Dan L. on June 6th, 2011

Did you vote for me in Dairy Queen’s “Mini Blizzard Treatment” video contest? If so, thanks! I really appreciate the support. But….I didn’t win a Mini Cooper. And to be honest, I kind of knew my chances weren’t very good in this particular contest. (Some background: In the DQ contest, 24 finalists were picked and the 6 people who’s video got the most votes would win a Mini Cooper. The vote counts were hidden during the voting and the Top 6 videos were revealed last week.) Click here to see the 6 winning videos.

At first I tried really hard to get as many votes as possible. But after a few days I took the time to check out the competition. If you’re in a video contest where votes alone determine the winners, you should always do a little research about the people you’re up against. For instance, if the contest is being run on facebook (like the DQ contest was) then try and find out how many facebook friends your competitors have. Just search for their names and their profile will come up. And if it’s not totally set to private, you can see how many friends they have. I have a mere 220 facebook friends so when I saw that several of the finalists had more than 1,000 friends, I knew they’d be hard to beat.

Moving beyond facebook, I also checked twitter. I searched for terms like “Vote, DQ, contest, mini cooper.” And sure enough, I saw tweets from several people in the contest including one guy who had almost 4,900 twitter followers. And after I did some more digging I discovered that this person was a semi-pro filmmaker with a gigantic and enthusiastic online fan base. But as it turned out, maybe some of his fans were a little too enthusiastic. To my surprise, this guy didn’t make the Top 6. One of his teammates tweeted that their entry was disqualified for “getting too many votes.” That could have been a joke but I don’t think it was. I don’t know if they cheated or even if they really got disqualified. But their entry recived hundreds of comments from people saying “I Voted!” So I can’t imagine how they couldn’t have won. Either they cheated and were disqualified or else most of the other contestants cheated in order to beat them.

But I digress. After Facebook and Twitter the next place you should check is Google News. You can learn amazing things from google news. If you do a blog search you can see if any bloggers are promoting any entries. And if you search Google’s news feed you can see if any contestants have gotten the media to do a story on them.

The point of all this research is to help you decide whether or not it is worth it to try and get more votes in the contest. If you discover one of your competitors has 1,000 facebook friends, 3,000 twitter followers, and a blog that’s read by 20,000 people a month then you’ll know that you might be fighting a losing battle.

So after I did my research I knew that there were 3 or 4 finalists that could get in the top 6 without breaking a sweat. And it looked like there were 2 or 3 other contestants that had a really strong chance of making it too. Of course, I happen to run a semi-popular website (yes, this one) and I have A LOT of good contacts on the web that could help me get votes. So I was thinking I might be able to squeak into the Top 6. I don’t know where I eventually ranked but I bet I came in 7th or 8th.

Even though I didn’t win a car, being in this contest was a really positive experience for me. My campaign for votes had some very interesting and unexpected consequences. I think this is one of those cases where a loss leads to an even greater (metaphorical) victory. I can’t talk about some of the things that happened because of this contest but I will say this; the support I got from my family and friends and even the readers of this site really warmed my cockles. It’s a very George-Baily-esque experience to have hundreds of people you’ve known for years rally behind you and wish you well. I mean, people I haven’t talked to since high school voted for me. Ex-girlfriends from 10 years ago voted for me. Former employers and co-workers voted for me. Random crew people I worked with on random projects 3 years voted for me. Yeah, I know it only takes 20 seconds to vote in an online contest. But it was nice to know that so many people I’ve crossed paths with cared enough to try and help me and then wrote me to let me know they still had my back. So that was nice. Plus, did you know that when you win a new car you get stuck paying like $7,000 in taxes on it!! Pfffft….so man, did I dodge a bullet on that one or what?

As is the case with most voted-based video contests, most of the winning videos aren’t so great. You can see all the results here. But below I’ll post the best winner followed by the not-best winner.

One of Six Winners. Prize: A Mini Cooper:

I have to say, I was totally shocked to see that 2nd video make the Top six. It was definitely not on my list of likely winners. The video didn’t get that many comments and the guy who made it has only 191 facebook friends. (only one vote per FB account counted, BTW) Also, no one blogged about his entry, no one tweeted about it and the media didn’t do any stories about it. So where the heck did all his votes come from?

Meet my pal the PurpleBot!

Posted by Dan L. on June 1st, 2011

Did you know that Whooping Cough is still around?? I didn’t but I do now. Because apparently, I have it! Six weeks of non-stop, furious coughing has put a big cramp in my video contest-related activities. Whooping cough can last up to 3 months but think I’m slowly getting better. So last week I was able to shoot my first video contest entry in a good, long while. (a good, long while for me, anyway.) It’s for Royal Purple’s “Reel Wars” contest. People were supposed to show how they used Royal Purple motor Oil. I don’t know how this idea got into my head but as soon as I saw this contest I knew I had to build a giant purple robot that shoots motor oil out of it’s finger. So that’s what I did.

The prize in this contest is $5,000. Judges pick the ultimate winner but first I need to make the finals. So once again, I’m in need of some votes. (I promise this will be my last “please vote for me post” for a while) I only have to make the top 5 this time and so far I’m doing pretty good. But how’s about you help me do even better by clicking the image below and voting for my !

Click the PurpleBot to vote for me!

Voting is done through facebook so no registration is needed. Just click the vote button, allow the RP app and boom, you voted. You can vote once every 24 hours if you’re so inclined but even one vote would be much appreciated. And hey, if you want to leave a a nice comment on my entry it couldn’t hurt. As always, thanks for the support everybody!