Right now thousands of filmmakers across the United States are all wondering the same thing; “When is Doritos going to start contacting the winners of the Crash the Super Bowl contest?” While no one at Frito-Lay has gone on record and explicitly said when the finalists will be notified, history does give us some clues. Over the years I’ve talked to lots and lots of Crash the Super Bowl finalists and time after time they always tell me the same thing; the finalists get a phone call from Doritos just before Christmas. In many cases it seems like a lot of finalists were contacted around December 21st. But last year Doritos called the winners early. According to one 2011-2012 finalist-team member I talked to “All of the finalists were notified by the Frito-Lay people on Dec. 16.”
I post this information every year and every year I get angry comments and e-mails from hopeful finalists that tell me I’m full of crap. Apparently some people are under the impression that the CTSB winners will find out that they won when the results are revealed on January 4th. But trust me folks, I’ve been running this site for a long time. It has never and will never work that way. When Frito-Lay calls the winners they tell them that they are a “potential” finalist. Before they can be considered an official finalist they first have to submit a bunch of release forms and other paperwork that proves they are actually eligible to enter and win the competition. For example, only US citizens are allowed to enter The Crash. If Doritos violated their own rules and picked a non-citizen as a finalist they could face a class-action lawsuit from all the other contestants who did meet the eligibility requirements. So there’s no chance Frito-Lay will risk something like that. They will have all the winners vetted and locked down weeks before the January 4th announcement.
So I’m sorry to say this but if you don’t hear from Fritolay by 5PM on friday you probably didn’t make the top 5. But don’t let that get you down! You had fun and made a cool video right? Why not build on that experience and go enter another video contest…you know, maybe one that’s 100 times easier to win! Think of the Crash the Superbowl contest like the lottery. It’s fun to enter but the chances of winning are sort of ridiculous. If you actually want to win some money and/or glory in a contest, try one that’s being run by Mofilm, Poptent, Tongal, Womadz, Zooppa or Eyeka or Genero. (Holy crap there are a lot of video contest sites out there.) Some of the contests on these sites offer big prizes but only get a 20 or 30 entries. I’ll take a 1 in 20 chance of winning $7,500 in a Poptent assignment over a 1 in 500 chance of winning $25,000 in the Crash the Super Bowl contest any day.
As I said, the Doritos finalists will official be revealed on January 4th. Be sure to check back here for reviews of all the videos that make the top 5. Plus on January 1st I’ll be post my own list of predictions for the CTSB contest so stay tuned to VCN for lots more Doritos news.
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Beardy,
Great article and overall coverage of CTSB. I’d only wish I’d discovered the site sooner! Lots of very useful thoughts and insight to be found here – terrific site, well done.
Good luck to all who entered, competition’s tough this year!
Tom
Our entry:
Well, doubtful that I won, but I assumed that going in, definitely enjoyed shooting my commercial by myself the morning before the deadline. Me, a tripod, a pair of tiny lights and a fun prop I built. Hoping next year I can get a few more people involved so I can get a bit more bold with the idea. Instead of being limited by working alone.
I’ll link it one more time…
‘Ere it disappears into the internet abyss.
I felt like our Doritos spot disappeared into the internet abyss right after we uploaded it. We got it up two days before the deadline. Within one minute it was rated one star. Spam from ‘The Doritos Fairy’ fans appeared in the comments section. Friends and family said they gave it 5 stars but it went no higher than 1.5 on the scale. Then came the last two days of the contest and it was buried. Never rose past 2 on the scale everyone sees, but if I sign into my profile the numerical value of the rating is 4.000. I don’t get it.
As one of our team members had pointed out, it doesn’t appear that they used any sort of even remotely sophisticated statistical analysis like Bayesian average to throw out any large or potentially misleading deviations in the data. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_average if that sort of thing interests you.
I think that them classifying the Facebook ratings and contests as being for purely entertainment purposes absolves them from having to make any sort of justification or explanation for the methods used in determining how or where entries would appear in the various listings.
We gave up long ago worrying about our placement in the online standings based on the assumption that if the online position and ratings didn’t really matter for consideration of finalists, it wasn’t even worth the effort to try and get into first or second page of entries in either the trending or ratings category.
While there were/are some very well executed entries in some of those top slots, a lot of what was there must have made it through people just skillfully rallying their social media resources or of course, good old fashioned spamming
Either way, it was a fun ride and I have no major complaints with how the contest was set up and run. I think all things considered, they’ve managed to balance things out pretty reasonably. It will be pretty interesting to see who the finalists are next week.
Tom