Yes….there was a video contest abut poop. It was run by “America’s digestive care company,” Renew Life Formulas Inc. Apparently they make nutritional supplements that are meant to improve regularity. I saw the “How Does Poo Move You?” video contest when they were looking for entries and briefly considered submitting something. I figured a contest like this wouldn’t get a ton of videos and the competition would be light. But ultimately my ego just wouldn’t allow me to shoot a wacky video about poop. There are just some lines even Beardy won’t cross! But I guess a lot of other people had no problem crossing that line because the contest wound up getting about 40 entries. Even more surprising, the winning video is actually kind of good. It has a very weird, Lonely Island vibe to it. Enjoy!
$3,000 cash prize, plus $1,000 worth of ReNew Life products:
Archive for July, 2011
How Does Poo Move You? Winner
Magic Bullet’s Kitchen Magician winner
It feels like Magic Bullet’s “” contest has been running forever but last week they finally crowned their winner. Here she is:
Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $10,000 and a trip to Los Angeles:
Click to watch
Yep, the winner’s entry was shot with an iPhone. But this wasn’t really a contest where quality mattered. This was really more about shooting an audition for a Magic Bullet infomercial. In the first round, the three contestants with the most votes got to go to LA and shoot a two-minute, mini-infomercial. Then a panel of judges watched the infomercials and picked their favorite host as their grand prize winner.
Hmmmm….I feel like I should say more about this contest but there isn’t really anything else to cover. I guess I could talk about the Magic Bullet for a bit. Hey, am I the only person that’s creeped out by the name “The Magic Bullet?” The “magic bullet” is what killed JFK! I know it’s been almost 50 years since the Kennedy assassination but it still feels too soon to appropriate the phrase “The Magic Bullet” and turn it into a thing that makes guacamole. I happen to think “The Bay of Pigs” would be a pretty clever name for a seaside BBQ place but that doesn’t mean I would ever eat there.
Beardy’s picks in the Gain contest
Actual Retail Value: Less than a million bucks
GREAT NEWS!! This morning I received an e-mail from Gain informing me that I was a winner in their “Smell Like A Million Bucks” contest! So I’m a millionaire, I assume! I was so excited I couldn’t even finish reading the e-mail. Let me go check it now so I can find out when and where I can pick up my first check….
…and I’m back. Ok, turns out I’m not a millionaire. Apparently I did NOT win the “Smell Like A Million Bucks” contest. Instead, I won a prize for voting in the Smell Like a Million Bucks contest. So what’s my prize? A bottle of Mr. Clean with the scent of Gain. But hey, a free bottle of Mr. Clean probably retails for like 7 bucks so that’s a decent give-away. Plus if I chug the whole thing maybe I’ll hallucinate that I’m a millionaire.
But anyway yes, Gain is giving away prizes to people who vote in the Smell Like A Million Bucks video contest. I’ve only voted 3 times so far and already I won a prize so they must plan on giving away a lot of bottles of Mr. Clean. So if you like free stuff, you might as well cast a vote or two. If you have a facebook page, it’s pretty easy to do. First you have to log in and click this link to “allow” the Gain Facebook App:
And then you can vote. But you don’t just want to vote for any piece of crap finalist video, right? Of course you don’t. There are some really terrible entries in Gain’s Top 25 and if one of those awful videos wins the grand prize, it’s going to be bad for the entire video contest “community.” If a million dollars can only get Gain a winner like this then why would any other companies want to run similar contests in the future?
Originally I had planned on doing a post about my personal favorite Gain finalists and my predictions for who might actually win. Instead, I’m going to endorse four videos that actually have a shot at winning and are also good enough to deserve to win. I’ve been paying close attention to the campaigning that’s been going on in this contest and to me it looks like these 4 videos are the front-runners. Each contestant has their own, interesting method of getting votes that I think can get them all the way to the top. But since I don’t want to divulge anyone’s strategy, I can’t tell you exactly WHAT these folks are doing to win. Just trust me, all of these people are really working hard at winning this contest.
If you want to watch and vote for any of these entries, just click on the images. If you’re going to vote for just one, I recommend this first video by Erika S. Apparently a glitch in the contest application caused a problem for this particular entry and according to Erika, she thinks she’s lost out on a lot of votes.
Click to view and vote
All three of these entries are very deserving of votes too. So maybe you’ll want to do like I’m doing and vote for a different entry every day. Voting ends on August 1st so you still have lots of chances to win your very own bottle of Mr. Clean!
Click to view and vote
Click to view and vote
Click to view and vote
Gain announces a surprising set of contest finalists
Today at 12pm Eastern, Gain detergent unveiled the 25 finalists in their million dollar, “Smell Like a Million Bucks” video contest. But it’s not the “Top 25″ that anyone following this contest could have expected. It now looks like Gain disqualified many of the entries that seemed like they were a safe bet to make the finals.
Gain was supposed to determine their finalists like this: each video would be given a creative score when it was submitted. The score was based on a 5-star system. Those stars were then converted to a percentage. So if you got 5 stars, your score was 100%. If you got 2 1/2 stars, your score was 50%. Next, Gain took the number of views your video got during the contest-long viewing period and multiplied that number by your creative score. So if you got 2,000 views and a creative score of 20%, your final score was 400. According to the rules, this was the only method Gain would use to select their Top 25 finalists.
So if a video could get 5,000 views, there was no way it would NOT make the finals, right? Even if a video had a creative score of 10%, 5,000 views would still give you a huge, final score. But real views were actually tremendously hard to get in this contest. For a view to be registered, a person had to log into facebook, accept the contest app, find the video they wanted to view and then watch it all the way to the end. But while it was hard to get genuine views, it was really, really easy to generate fake views. All a person had to do was create a few dozen or a few hundred fake facebook accounts and spend hours and hours watching their video every day for weeks. And it looks like that’s exactly what a lot of people did. But what those repeat-viewers didn’t realize is that it is really easy to detect that kind of cheating. The third-party company running the contest application is able to see where views come from. So if some idiot viewed their entry 50 times a day from the same computer, that would raise a big red flag even if they used 50 separate facebook accounts. But it seems like there were a whole lot of idiots in this contest because for some mysterious reason, most of the “most viewed” videos did not make the finals.
Last Monday, as soon as the viewing period ended, all of the view counts on all of the entries disappeared. I suspected that might happen so a few hours before the deadline, I took a screen shot of the 12 “most viewed” entries in the Gain contest. The Red X’s indicate which of these “popular” entries did not make the finals and the Green Checks indicate the videos that did make the finals.
The (almost) final view counts of the 12 "most viewed" entries. I added the Red X's and Green checks to indicate the videos that did and did not make the finals
Take a look at those view counts. Some of them are ridiculously high. The video in first place has 8,449 views! But out of the 480 videos that were submitted, only 22 had view counts higher than 1,000. So 8,449 views is unnaturally high. Now, many of these videos were actually pretty great. And really, all of them are at least kind of decent. But even if these videos all sucked and even if they recived a 10% creative score, 10% of 4,000 is 400. And gain actually picked several finalist videos that had FEWER than 400 views.
So all of these Red X’ed videos must have been disqualified. Gain of course can’t reveal WHY these entries didn’t make the Top 25 but there are only 3 explanations:
1. An entry could have gotten a creative score of ZERO.
2. An entry could be disqualified for cheating.
3. An entry could have been disqualified for breaking other rules like using “third party content” (music, images, SFXs) the entrant didn’t own.
There is no way any of these entries were bad enough to deserve a creative score of zero so reason #1 can’t possibly explain what happened. Some of these entries do use “third party content” but a lot of the the videos in the finals do. (Like this one) So I don’t think Gain disqualified any of these submissions because they broke other rules. So…that only leaves cheating.
I kept a close eye on the view count race in this contest and I can tell you, it looked like there was massive amounts of cheating happening. Some videos recived 100′s of views every day like clockwork. Others would suddenly gain 200 views in the middle of the night. There was even one video that got just about 270 views every day! What are the odds that the same number of people would watch the same video every day for several days in a row? Or how about the video that was the 3rd Most Viewed? That video has nothing in it that could possibly cause it to be disqualified. That video was approved on June 22nd and by the view count deadline of July 11th, they had 5,150 views. Does 257 views A DAY really seem realistic when most entries in this contest weren’t able to get 257 views during the entire viewing period?
So did all those people with Red X’s on their videos really cheat and fake their views? There’s no way for us to know. For the record, I’m not saying any of those people cheated for sure. But the evidence suggests that they did SOMETHING to break the rules of the contest that got them disqualified. I do want to say that I do NOT believe that the 2nd most viewed video cheated. It was created by a reader of this site named Andrew D. and I know that he had an army of people working on getting him a lot of views. But I do know that other contestants were trying to get him disqualified because he posted his video to youtube and that was sort of against the rules. So, I think he might have been bounced on a technicality.
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I actually entered this contest but I submitted my entry way too late. I only managed to get about 400 views so I didn’t make the Top 25. However, I absolutely have to applaud Gain and the company running the contest, Don Jagoda Associates for doing the right thing here. It was against the rules to “view” your video over and over using fake accounts so anyone who did that deserved to be disqualified. It’s nice to see that some companies actually care about running a fair, online contest.
HOWEVER…I also have to CONDEMN Gain for basically lying to contestants about how they were going to determine the winners. Even if Gain had to disqualify dozens and dozens of entries, there is simply no way that a video like this should have or could have made the finals:
Click to view
This video only received about 200 views. So even if it got a perfect, 100% creative score, it still would have only had a creative score of 200 which wasn’t supposed to be enough to get it in the top 25. But this video is so amazingly awful that there is no way it got a perfect creative score. So how and why did it ever make the finals?
It’s clear that something seriously unethical did happen here. Gain lied to their customers about how the winners would be picked. So what can you do about it? Jack shit, that’s what! The finalists have been picked and there’s nothing you can do to fight Gain’s terrible decisions.
And so, the real contest now begins! To be honest, I’m actually kind of relived I didn’t make it to the finals now that I know that Gain is willing to play fast and loose with the rules. And on top of Gain’s shadiness, votes alone determine the winner of this contest. So I can’t even imagine how horrible the next 2 weeks are going to be for the people in the finals. If a finalist wants to have any chance of winning, they’re going to have to spend at least 60 hours a week begging for votes. And if someone isn’t willing to work that hard on their campaigns, they might as well not even bother. Because somewhere, among the finalists there are surely several people who ARE ready to take the next 2 weeks off from work and do nothing but scrounge for votes. One of the people listed on this page is going to win a million dollars: I can’t tell you specifically who the winner will be but I can tell you this, the prize will go to whoever is smart enough not to cheat and whoever is determined enough to dedicate every waking hour for the next 2 weeks to winning that million bucks.
Later this week I’m going to announce my picks and predictions for this contest. So if you made the finals and want to let me know why you think you’re going to take home that million bucks, let me know: .
My very first novelty check!
About 2 weeks ago I got word that I had won first place in Royal Purple Motor Oil’s “Reel Wars” video contest and the good people at RP said that one of their representatives would hand deliver to me a check for $5,000. But in addition to that tiny, cashable check, they also wanted to present me with a giant. novelty check. And I’ll tell you what….I was super stoked. I’ve won a lot of video contests in the last few years but somehow, this would be my first big, fake check! True to their word, a team from royal purple showed up at my door and gave me this….
I'm going to giant Las Vegas and putting all this on Red.
You know what’s really funny about that check? It has a check number on it; number 508. I have to wonder, does Royal Purple have a giant, novelty check book? And did 507 other giant checks get issued before I recived this one?
By the way, if you’re interested, that won the contest for me.
Poptent opens new office in Brazil
Are you a filmmaker that lives in South America? Do you speak Portuguese? Well if you answered ‘no’ to either of those questions, you can just ignore this article because it will be of no interest to you! Ok, I’m kidding of course. This story is important to anyone who enters video contests or who shoots ads for sites like Poptent. It shows you just how huge “crowdsourced media” is getting. When companies started using goofy web ads created by “users” it was called a fad by some in the ad industry. But advertisers have really come to take crowdsourced media seriously. When a company cuts out ad agencies and goes right to their consumers for content, not only do they save a fortune but they get fresh, outside-the-box commercials.
With the demand for User-Generated content on the rise across the globe, Poptent.net has decided to expand to its first international market, South America by opening a new office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Why Brazil? Poptent’s press release about the Brazilian office lays out some amazing stats:
“Brazil is one of the world’s fastest-growing online video markets, with comScore reporting that Internet users in Brazil viewed a total of 26.2 billion online videos in 2010, and YouTube experiencing 33% year-over-year growth in unique viewership. The country also has high rates of social media participation, as Facebook experienced 258% year-over-year growth in the past year alone and more than 70% of the country’s Internet users visit blogs, all according to comScore. Overall, Boston Consulting Group projects that the country’s 2010 base of 40 million Internet users will grow 15% annually through 2015.”
Here’s the TL;DR version of the above paragraph; Brazil is huge and full of lots of people who spend a crazy amount of time consuming content on the Internet. Poptent even calls the country, “one of the world’s fastest-growing and most engaged populations of Internet users.”
So are you going to get a crack at the assignments that come out of that new Brazilian office? Well yeah….kind of. The goal of Poptent Brazil will be to reach out to local filmmakers to create content in Portuguese. But South American assignments are officially open to anyone. Plus, there is a chance that Poptent might occasionally ask American creators to produce videos that can be dubbed into Spanish or Portuguese. Poptent’s first South American assignment launched on June 30th and more assignments are coming soon. So stay tuned to poptent’s blog or feed for more details.
Check out these sweet Gain entries!
Well, there’s only one day left to enter Gain detergent’s massive “Smell like a Million Bucks” video contest. Since view counts help determine which videos make the finals, a few weeks back I encouraged readers to send me their submissions so that I could post them. The “viewing” deadline isn’t until July 11th so why not help these fine folks out by watching their videos? Before you can view any of the Gain entries, you first need to allow the Gain app on Facebook. Click here to do that:
Are you back? Good. If you allowed the app you can now watch the entries. To view a video, click on the image. I’ll post the videos that were shot by long-time VCN readers first because I love them the most.
Now, I also entered this contest but because I’m classy I’ll post my own video last. It just got approved on Friday and thanks to the holiday weekend I’m way behind on views. So if you can spare a click, let me have it!
If anyone else who entered the Gain contest would like their entry posted here, just send me an e-mail and and I’ll add it to this post.
