2013 February | Video Contest News - Featuring News about Video Contests!

G&G’s “Greatest Glory” video contest winners

Posted by Dan L. on February 26th, 2013

<sarcasm> Everybody loves war, right? I mean, how could you not? It’s a super fun way to make friends, get exercise and enjoy the outdoors. If you’ve never been lucky enough to fight in a real war at least you can still play war thanks to G&G Armaments and Airsoft. They make pellet guns for adults that are modeled after real military-grade weapons like the M16. G&G announced the results of their “Greatest Glory” video contest last month and the winning videos are pretty impressive. For this contest, grown men were supposed dress up like real soldiers and pretend to blow each other away in their own, homemade war films. Here’s the video from Finland that won the grand prize. The takeaway lesson from this entry is that war is a great way for friends to bond. And since these dudes are all shooting each other with pellets they get to skip the part where they spend the rest of their lives mourning the buddies they lost in battle.

Grand Prize winner. Prize: $10,000 + a trip to trade show in Nuremberg, Germany:

That was really slick and the editing was great. It’s really hard to successfully sentimentalize war so my hat’s off to the guy who directed this. The scrapbook full of fun memories was really a nice touch. (Every solider should get one once their tour is over!) It was also a good idea not to show any simulated blood or carnage. The world would be a much better place if real firefights ended with guys gleefully tapping each other on the shoulder.

So that video was great but I actually prefer the entry that won the “creative award.” In this video, an “American” soldier encounters various bad guys from history. First he spots some Nazis, then some Viet Cong and finally he encounters some Taliban fighters. Each time he sees a different historical enemy, he changes his costume and pellet gun to match the enemy’s era. This video is especially impressive because it was also shot by a group of guys from Finland. It must be extra hard to pretend to be an American Soldier if you’ve never met one or heard their exciting war stories first hand. So these guys just had to guess what kind of generic Asian music would play if real bad guys in bamboo hats were creeping around an abandoned factory.

Creative Award Winner. Prize: $5,000:

The word is that G&G is going to run this contest again in 2013. So if you happen to have a friend or father or uncle or grandfather that actually served in a war (assuming they’re not too traumatized to talk about it) ask them if they remember any fun missions that you could recreate with $350 toy guns and maybe you can win some cash!</sarcasm>

Ok, I’ve just got to say one or two non-sarcastic things here; First, I have no problem with war films and I think participating in historical reenactments is actually a really admirable hobby. But reenactments and war movies portray combat in a realistic way. They don’t glorify war or make it seem fun and harmless. The problem with the G&G contest is that the entries show the action and excitement of war and totally leave out the consequences of war. And here’s another thing that bothered me; ten videos received prizes in this contest but only one of the winners was from the US. (3 came from Finland, 3 from Poland and the rest came from Spain, the Ukraine and Sweden.) But most of the actors in these videos are dressed up in American or American-style uniforms. winning video from Ukraine even features fighters wearing incorrect American flag patches; one has an arm patch on her hat and another has an arm patch on his chest. When I was a kid my grandpa explained to me that Army arm patches look backwards because that’s what the flag looks like when you’re charging forward. It’s a minor and unimportant detail to some guy playing make-believe in Europe but it’s a serious sign of disrespect if you happen to be an American. It just feels wrong to see all these people from Finland and Poland running around and acting like being an American Soldier is just a big harmless game. Wikipedia just told me that Finland was actually allied with the Axis Powers during WWII and they had some pretty gruesome battles with the Russians. If me and my Midwestern American buddies went out to the woods this weekend and put on homemade Finnish and Soviet WWII uniforms and crawled around pretending to reenact the Battle of Tali-Ihantala even though we had absolutely no understanding what actually happened there well….that would be sort of sick, wouldn’t it?

Need some inspiration? Check out Mofilm’s new “Hall of Fame”

Posted by Dan L. on February 23rd, 2013

Blarg. February sucks. I live in Illinois so February always feels like a wasted month. The snow and the cold and the ice and the slush turn everything into a big hassle. I’ve pretty much just been hiding out all year and I haven’t filmed anything in weeks. But fortunately, March is just a few days away. Ah yes, my contempt for February is matched only by my adoration of March. In March, the snow starts to melt, the sky turns blue, the beer turns green and the Shamrock Shake is once again available for a limited time only. Spring is that time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of winning money in video contests. I’m already on the lookout for good contests that I can enter once the weather starts to warm up. My goal for 2013 is to do one really good video every few weeks and stop doing so many half-assed projects. If you too are interested in whole-assing it this year you should probably check out Mofilm’s new Hall of Fame. The curators of the hall (ok, it’s really just a page on a website) have collected the best and most successful Mofilm winners and posted them all in one place. There’s some really amazing work on display and watching all of these amazing videos is a great way to psych yourself before your next writing session. Here are a few of my favorites:

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Now that you know where the bar is, you’ll have a better shot at jumping over it. Oh by the way, Coke was so pleased with that last video that they aired it on Valentine’s Day during American Idol. More on that story here.

Big Winners: The SmallHD Story

Posted by Dan L. on February 19th, 2013

Here’s an interesting short(ish) documentary about a team of friends from North Carolina who have managed to win Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest twice. Actually, these guys have made the finals three times in total and they even got into the Top 5 twice in one year! Their ad, wound up being ranked the #2 commercial of the 2010 Super Bowl so they won a bonus of $600,000. I personally would have re-invested that money in lottery tickets but N.C. crew used their winnings to expand their field monitor company, SmallHD.

Genero picks their 2012 Video of the Year

Posted by Dan L. on February 17th, 2013

Holly Gennero: Die Hard’s wife and founder of Genero.tv (I assume)

It’s not easy to produce a decent, low-budget music video (especially when you can’t shoot new footage of the featured artists) but some of the winners that come out of Genero.tv are surprisingly good. Last year the crowdsourced music video site received more than 1,900 submissions and from those the ~~Gennero~~ Genero staff selected 140 nominees for their “Video of the Year” award. The big 2012 winner was shot for for Passion Pit’s “I’ll be Alright” contest by a filmmaker named Greg Barth. The video already earned $3,000 for winning the Passion Pit contest but the director will receive a $5,000 bonus for winning the Video of the Year competition. Here’s a little background info from the Genero blog:

Greg’s video became the official video for ‘I’ll Be Alright’ and has gone on to receive 400,000 views and counting on Passion Pit’s YouTube channel; it was also selected as a Staff Pick on Vimeo. The video is striking, surreal and packed with deeper meaning while being hugely entertaining and memorable. It’s a wonderfully realised concept, and expertly edited.

Greg describes the film: “A heart broken museum security guard sees reality shift after abusing his medication, bringing him back to a glorified vision of his past love. Each piece of art suddenly takes part in illustrating the love cycle surrounding him. From the triangle symbolizing Seduction (Gold), to the Fiery Passion that consumes a relationship (Yellow), the entangled and complicated Break Up (Red, Dynamite), ending up with the hopeful and healing Rebirth ( Green).”

Like most modern Internet-users I have the attention span of a drunk four-year-old so I rarely have the patience to sit through an entire 3 minute long music video. But this one really struck a cord with me for some reason and I watched it from beginning to end…twice. It’s a simple idea but it’s well executed and weirdly hypnotic.

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Genero also picked a “Director of the Year” and it was Julia Rogowska and her team, “OMGITSME.” Together they submitted 5 darn good videos in 2012 but it looks like they only had one winner. But the OMGITSME team will receive $10,000 for winning the “Director of the Year” award so that’s nice. You can see more of their work here.

VCN Sponsor Spotlight: 2/14/2013

Posted by Dan L. on February 14th, 2013

Since it’s Valentine’s Day I thought I’d show our sponsors a little love and list some of the biggest and best contests that are being run on Poptent, Mofilm and Tongal right now! Enter one of these and maybe next year you’ll be able to buy your significant other something better than gas station roses and a blank card from the dollar store:

Deadline: 3/4/13

Poptent’s Orange County Credit Union Assignment: When it comes to Poptent assignments I always tell people to skip the “fun” ones. Right now Poptent is running contests for Popsicle and Lay’s Potato Chips and and those assignments are going to get an avalanche of entries. Anyone can buy a box of Popsicle and make a fun video. But it takes real talent to make a Credit Union seem fun. So the Orange Country Credit Union assignment is probably the one you should focus on this month. There probably won’t be a lot of submissions plus the purchase price is $10,000! The goal is to motivate viewers to open a new checking account “by delivering an uplifting and aspirational message.” This assignment also comes with a very special bonus prize. The best “Early Bird” video submitted before February 18th will win $1,000. So if you’re going to enter this one, you might as well shoot your entry this weekend. Deadline: March 4th, 2013. For more details. click here.

Deadline: 2/21/13

Mofilm’s “Texas 2013″ HSBC contest: Oh crap! It’s already February and once again I forgot to make plans to go to Austin for South by South West. Every fall my friends and I tell each other that as soon as passes go on sale we’re going to buy some and do SXSW for real this time. But once again we forgot and now the passes are probably sold out and every hotel room in town is probably booked. But there’s still one other way you can get to SXSW this year. You can win one of the categories in Mofilm’s “Texas 2013″ competition. The deadline for most of the categories is February 18th but the deadline for the HSBC contest was just extended to February 21st. When a sponsor extends their deadline it sometimes means that they’re not happy with the entries they’ve gotten so far. So this might be a good chance for you to slide in and win one of the prizes that are at stake. (UPDATE: Turns out that Mofilm hasn’t actually received any HSBC entries yet since most videos are submitted within 48 hours before the deadline. The HSBC deadline was extended simply because the brief went up late.) First place gets you $8,000 plus a trip for two to Austin, TX for SXSW. If you do win, I’m available to go as your +1. I will pay you back by buying you some BBQ brisket at the Iron Works. Deadline: February 21st, 2013. For more info, click here.

Pitch Deadline: 2/28/13

Tongal’s Excedrin Contest: As soon as I’m done with this post I’m gonna start working on a Pitch for this contest. Excedrin is offering $75,000 in prizes and there are lots of ways to win some cash. Unlike most Tongal contests, this one doesn’t have an idea phase. So if you want to enter you have to submit a pitch based on 1 of 16 pre-approved scenarios. Each scenario is a different “Headache Inducing Situation” like waiting in line at the DMV and sitting in rush hour traffic. Excedrin will pay 16 pitch winners (one for each idea) 700 bucks so they can produce their video. In the video phase, there are 20(!) prizes ranging from $500 to $20,000. Even if you don’t win a Pitch prize, you can still shoot and submit a “wild card” video. Pitch Deadline: February 28th, 2013. For details, head here.

Good luck and Happy Valentine’s Day everybody! Never forget, Beardy loves you!

Speed Stick’s 2013 Super Bowl comercial was shot for a Tongal contest!

Posted by Dan L. on February 12th, 2013

The ads that win the Crash the Super Bowl contest always get a lot of attention. But “Goat 4 Sale” and “Fashionista Daddy” weren’t the only crowdsourced commercials that aired during Super Bowl XLVII. Remember the Speed Stick ad where the guy gets caught holding a strange (and ridiculously attractive) woman’s panties?

That commercial was shot for a Speed Stick contest that was run on Tongal! It’s always exciting to see a video contest entry air on TV but it’s even more exciting when people don’t know or care that the spot wasn’t produced by a giant production company. As the lines between pro and semi-pro productions blur, big companies are going to be more comfortable with buying and airing videos that were shot on spec or for contests.

The funny thing is, “Unattended Laundry” didn’t actually win the Speed Stick competition. It came in second and the director only won $5,000. Five grand is a very nice prize but the video that came in first received $10,000. The winning entry was amusing but it wasn’t really a Super Bowl type of ad, if ya know what I mean. So this situation is a little confusing. Unattended Laundry was shot by a Tongaler named David Brashaer and he happens to be one of the best video contest filmmakers in the history of video contest filmmakers. (He created one of my favorite contest entries ever, Duct Tron.) I’m sure he was very excited to see his work air during the biggest TV event of the year but man, I really hope Speed Stick gave him a little extra somethin’ somethin’ once they decided to make his entry their official 2013 Super Bowl ad. If the sponsor had gone with one of those giant production companies I mentioned a commercial like Unattended Laundry would have cost at least $50,000 to produce. Despite its small budget, the commercial does seem to be pretty popular; it’s up to 1.4 million views on youtube and it’s been airing on TV all week. So hopefully Speed Stick will give the director some kind of bonus or residual payment for a job well done.

Goat 4 Sale wins the Nielson Super Bowl Ad Survey

Posted by Dan L. on February 8th, 2013

Ahhhh!

Just before the Super Bowl I proclaimed that if the Crash the Super Bowl ad didn’t win 1st place in the USA Today Ad Meter poll, I’d eat a tin can. Well, Goat 4 Sale did air during the game but it came in 7th. I was going to keep my word and eat a tin can but my doctor gave me a note saying I didn’t have to do it because I guess eating metal will kill you. Apparently it will also kill a goat. My doctor explained that goats got the reputation as can-eaters because they are sometimes seen eating the paper labels off of old cans. So my doctor gave me a Campbell’s soup label and he made me eat it in front of him. My doctor’s a dick.

As I explained in my previous post, the results of this year’s ad meter totally took me by surprise. I knew that USA Today was going to “open it up to the public” but I could have sworn that they were also doing their traditional focus group thing. But nope, public votes alone determined the results of this year’s poll. And that pretty much explains why the results of this year’s poll were so ridiculous. I’m positive that if USA Today had done focus group testing like they used to, at least one Doritos filmmaker would have made the Top 3. Actually, if the ad meter hadn’t changed this year I’m pretty sure the results would have been pretty similar to Nielson’s Super Bowl ad survey. Nielson released the results of that poll the other day and Goat 4 Sale was ranked the #1 most liked commercial of the game as well as the #1 most memorable commercial of the game. Here’s Nielson’s full top 10:

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This list makes a lot more sense than USA Today’s top 10. Goat 4 Sale totally blew away the competition. Here’s how Nielson got these numbers:

All Super Bowl ads were ranked on likability. The Likability Index was calculated by taking the likability score (percent of viewers who liked the ad) and indexing versus the mean likability score of all 2013 Super Bowl ads. For example, with a Likability Index of 221, the Doritos ad has proven to be 2.21 times as likable as the average 2013 Super Bowl ad.

Notes: The Top 10 lists are based on about 6,750 ad surveys of Super Bowl viewers; 67 unique national creative executions (excluding movie spots) during the game’s four quarters and halftime were considered for the list.

So in the USA Today poll, anybody from anywhere could vote on the ads. They didn’t have to rate every commercial and a lot of people voted before the Doritos ads were even revealed. In the Nielson survey, it sounds like the viewers were pre-screened and they had to vote on every single ad. That’s the right way to do a poll like this. Winning the Nielson survey is a major accomplishment and it’s a shame that there’s no bonus prize money for winning this poll. Now that the old ad meter has been ruined, maybe next year FritoLay should dump USA Today and forge a new partnership with Nielson.

Why didn’t Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl ads do better on this year’s USA Today Ad meter?

Posted by Dan L. on February 4th, 2013

Late last night, USA Today released the full results of the 2013 Super Bowl ad meter poll and there was great news for Doritos fans; The Crash the Super Bowl winners and were ranked the #1 and #2 :30 second commercials of the game! Unfortunately, the ad meter poll included every commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, even the 2 minute long short film/ad things. So Fashionista Daddy actually came in 4th and Goat 4 Sale came in 7th. Here is the official Top 10 from USA Today:

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Because neither Doritos commercial made the Top 3, the winning filmmakers won’t receive any bonus money from FritoLay. And that is a goddamn shame. The two guys who won the Crash the Super Bowl contest this year were completely and totally robbed. If USA Today hadn’t changed their methods and wrecked their ad meter this year I am positive that at least one Doritos finalist would have won a six or seven figure bonus.

For 24 Super Bowls in a row, USA Today conducted their ad meter poll in exact same way. Here’s how USA Today described the process:

It was pretty simple: We’d bring in 300 or so pre-screened viewers to watch the game at several locations. The panelists were enticed with a small payment, a giant theater-sized screen, a knob-turning device and thick sandwiches to record their impressions of the commercials from start to finish.

“They were into both the game and the ads,” recalls editor Fred Meier, who helped honcho the project from the start. “We could tell from the crowd reaction how high an ad was going to score. And we never wanted to hear them guffawing late in the third or in the fourth quarter, which would mean a potential late new leader in the ad contest.”

So the old Ad Meter poll was a highly organized live event. The USA Today team had people turn little dials to indicate how much they liked or disliked a commercial as it aired. People watched the ads in real time and they only got to see them once. They didn’t give each commercial an individual score. Instead, a computer averaged out their dial activty. So commercials that were exciting or funny from beginning to end always did very well. FritoLay noticed that Crash the Super Bowl ads were actually scoring very high on the ad meter so in the fall of 2008 they offered some bonus prizes to any filmmaker who could crack the top 3. 1st place on the ad meter would get you a million dollar bonus, 2nd was good for $600K and 3rd got you $400K. Filmmakers studied the mechanics of the USA Today ad meter and they started crafting ads that would theoretically score very well in a dial-measured style focus group test. And that plan actually paid off for a few lucky filmmakers. At least one Crash the Super Bowl ad managed to make the Top 3 every year since 2009. And Doritos commercials actually won the ad meter poll in 2009, 2011 and 2012.

But for the first time in 5 years, Doritos didn’t even crack the Top 3. Actually, 2013 was a bad year for ALL the funny 30 second Super Bowl ads. The top 10 was dominated by 60 and even 120 second(!) long sentimental or lighthearted “cute” commercials about farmers and families that were narrated by Oprah and the ghost of Paul Harvey.

So what the heck happened? Well it turns out that this year USA Today decided to throw their 25 year old ad meter experiment into the garbage and then they replaced the whole thing with a B.S. online poll. Again, here’s a quote from the folks at USA Today:

In an attempt to make the Ad Meter more social, we partnered with Facebook last year, which worked out fine except it was a bit confusing to mix the panel reactions with the later Facebook results.

So this year (the 25th Annual Ad Meter!), we’ve gone totally digital, dropping the live panels and Facebook, and instead offering everyone in America the chance to sign up online and vote from their computers.

So basically the paper kept the name of the project and got rid of everything that cost them any money….and anything that gave the poll any credibility. Here are three big changes that wound up skewing the ad meter results in unexpected ways:

1. Anybody could vote. Instead of a few hundred participants watching each ad in a closed and controlled screening room, any random person with a web connection could vote and affect the outcome of the poll. In total, about 7,000 people across the US voted for some or all of the ads in the poll.

2. Viewers did not have to rate every commercial. This was an enormous and very important change. Voting in the online poll was actually launched BEFORE the game even started. But the Doritos ads didn’t appear until after they aired because Doritos wanted to keep the winners a secret. So if you voted early, you didn’t even see the Crash the Super Bowl ads.

3. The ad meter voters were not pre-screened. When a company wins the ad meter they get millions of dollars worth of free publicity since their commercial is shown over and over and over online and on the news. So is it really so far-fetched to suspect that maybe some companies just hired people (or asked their employees) to give their Super Bowl commercial a high score? As I said, only about 7,000 people voted in the online poll this year. What if a giant billion-dollar, multinational corporation like Proctor and Gamble had sent a mass e-mail to all of their 129,000 employees asking them to sign up and vote for Tide’s Super Bowl commercial? Even if only 500 people out of that 129,000 voted they would still have a massive impact on that commercial’s score.

4. No more dials. People at home don’t have dials hooked up to their computers. So instead of rating an ad second-by-second, viewers gave each commercial an over all score on a scale of 1 to 10. The old poll measured a participant’s instant and immediate reaction to an ad. But the new poll gave people time to think about how much they liked each commercial. I suspect this had an odd psychological affect on some people. If I saw a commercial were a guy got hit in the balls I might chuckle…but then I’d feel kind of like a moron for laughing at something so low-brow. So I suspect a lot of ad meter participants took a moment to decide how they should react to each ad rather than give an honest assessment of their actual reaction. If Tide’s 60-second long “Miracle Stain” spot had run last year, I don’t think it would have come in 2nd on the ad meter. That’s because it started off slowly and I think a lot of people would have been bored after 40 seconds. But this year people watched the ad from start to finish before they made any judgments. I think viewers decided it was cute and funny and that it was the “right kind” of ad. I think this is the reason all these sentimental ads did so well last night. It just felt good to give them high scores. The commercials maybe weren’t entertaining but viewers subconsciously wanted to demonstrate that they had good taste. So a wacky chip ad staring a guy in a dress gets a 7 but an inspiring (but sort of confusing) Oprah-narrated ad about families deserved to get a 10 because that was a serious and maybe even an important commercial.

So the USA Today ad meter is dead and it’s never coming back. Sure, the folks at USA Today are going to continue to parade around its corpse like it’s still real and relevant but it’s not. In fact, USA Today apparently wants to bastardize their brand even further by running ad meter polls during other events like the Oscars. (The fact that companies don’t make special commercials for the Oscars or the All-Star game apparently doesn’t mater.) So in the end, this just comes down to an issue of money and free publicity. USA Today realized that the Ad Meter name was worth something so they’ve decided to make a couple bucks by running shitty online polls under the once respected Ad Meter banner.

I’m not really sure what all this means for the Crash the Super Bowl contest but I’ll be frank, I’m a little worried. It will now be much, much harder for Dortios commercials to score a #1, #2 or #3 spot in the poll. That means FritoLay will be getting a lot less exposure and free press out of The Crash. I suspect that FritoLay will run the contest again next year but I also suspect they might change the terms a bit. I really think it’s time for Doritos to start paying bonus prizes to the finalists if their ad makes it to air regardless of how they do on the ad meter. They could still do the bonus ad meter prizes but if they guaranteed an extra $25,000 just for airing that’d be really nice. I know that might sound like a lot of money but it’s chump change when you consider the fact that FritoLay has to pay at least $3,000,000 to air one 30 second Super Bowl commercial.