Tomorrow is Good Friday and that probably means you’ve got a 3 day weekend ahead of you. Why not put your free time to good use and shoot an entry for the “Open VINKI Style” video contest? To enter, all you have to do is “Make a maximum 3 minutes CRAZY, FUNNY, ZINGY Video about VINKI.” Why should you run out and spend your Friday off working on a video for this contest? Well because your chances of winning a decent prize are pretty damn good. The deadline is April 7th and so far, only 7 videos have been submitted. But Vinki is offering a total of 18 prizes! Here’s what’s at stake: ONE 13″ MacBook Air, TWO IPADs, FIVE $200 Gift Card and TEN $50 Gift Cards. After the deadline passes, judges from VINKI will pick 18 finalists and then a public vote will determine who wins what prizes. If you win a $200 gift card be sure to buy me something nice! One final note, if you don’t know where to find VINKI products you should check Whole Foods. They sell Vinki stuff there. For more info about the contest, head here:
Archive for March, 2013
Quick! Go shoot an entry for Vinki’s video contest
“Dub the Dew” contest turns into a hilarious crowdsourced disaster
I love the Internet and all the goofballs who work so hard to keep it weird. I’ve said this a million times before but contests that let “the public” determine the winners via online voting are an idiotic waste of time. These polls are easy to manipulate and in many cases they just devolve into a PR clusterfuck. I came across a glorious example of that type of cluster-fuckery and I laughed so hard that I just had to share it. Last fall (it looked like) Mountain Dew ran a contest to choose the name of their new green apple-infused soda. Some users over on 4Chan and Reddit decided to flood the contest with amazingly offensive suggestions. Here’s a screen shot of one 4Chan user encouraging others to vote for his favorite entry. I’ll link to this image but I won’t post it because it’s got a big old picture of Hitler on it and there’s no way I’m embedding a pic of fuggin hitler on my blog. The contest wound up being straight-up hacked at some point and Mountain Dew the sponsor had to shut the whole thing down. But before the contest disappeared, someone managed to take this screen shot of the official leader board:
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I saw a full list of suggestions and some other top contenders were “Soda,” “Soylent Green” and my favorite, “Sierra Mist.” To me (and the folks on 4Chan) this was all pretty funny. But big companies flip out when stuff like this happens. What’s really hilarious here is that Mountain Dew didn’t even run this contest! Some pizza place ran it just for fun. But the website looked so good that I guess everybody just figured it was an official contest. And that right there is one reason so many companies are still afraid of crowd-sourcing. Some marketing people are seriously worried that “the crowd” will go rouge and use a contest to make the sponsor look bad. But it is REALLY easy to prevent stupid stuff like this from happening. First you have to put out the word that random-ass pizza places can’t use your company’s logo and products in unsanctioned promotions. Then the other thing you need to do is make sure your company runs better contests! No one would have ever heard of the “Dub the Dew” contest if the pizza place had somebody look at and approve the submissions before they went public. “The Crowd” is full of hilarious lunatics and they’re not to be trusted. But if a sponsor does their due diligence and puts a few safeguards in place their contests would run a lot smoother. If you want to read about some other cases of online votes that were disrupted by troublemakers, check out this cracked article: 6 Hilarious Cases of Online Voting Contests Gone Awry.
How to get iStockPhoto images for FREE
I used to love the iStockphoto.com. If you needed a stock image you could look through their massive catalog, find just the right photo or illustration and then pay a few bucks to license it. I used to use istockphoto images all the time in my video contest entries (they make great green screen backgrounds) but last year I noticed they had jacked up their prices to ridiculous levels. Let me give you an example; say you’re working on a video for a contest about alternative energy sources and you need to include shot of a nuclear power plant. You check iStockPhoto and find the perfect shot; but oh man, look at those prices!
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The Extra-Small version is $19.00! I don’t want to sound like an old fogey but back in my day (2009) I could buy an image license on iStockPhoto for just a few bucks. $53 is a great price for a photo if your project is guaranteed make a profit. But what if you’re doing a job on spec or working on a video contest entry? Wouldn’t it be great if you could download a clean, watermark-free version of an IstockPhoto image to use in your spec projects? If you win or make a sale, you can just go back and pay the licensing fee. But if you don’t make any money then hey, no harm, no foul.
Well….there is a way to do that. Actually this trick works on images from any photo licensing site. First, find the image you want to use and right-click on it to download a copy. It will have a watermark on it but that doesn’t matter. Next, head to Google and click the Images option. You’ll notice that the search bar now has a little camera in it:
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Click on the camera. Two options will come up. Chose “Upload an Image.” When you’re prompted, upload the copy of the iStockPhoto you just stole downloaded from the site and hit the search button. Google will take the image and scan the entire freaking Internet looking for similar images. The results will look like this:
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Google will list every website that used the image you searched for. But the search isn’t 100% precise so it also includes copies of the photo that do not have the istockphoto watermark. So if someone, somewhere has paid the licensing fee and posted the image online, you can see it…and download a copy for yourself. (News sites seem to be the best source of stock images) This trick won’t work for every photo or illustration and you may not be able to find a High Quality version of the image you want. As you can see from those search results, I was able to find this 600 x 399px copy of the Nuclear Plant photo. An image of that size would look good but not great in an HD video.
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So it may not be perfect but at least it’s free. This trick may seem pretty handy but there is a problem with it; the process I just described is sort of AGAINST THE LAW. You’re violating an author’s copyrights and using their work to try and make money. That’s not only illegal, it’s sort of a dick move. If you put an iStockPhoto in one of your video contest entries and you lose, no one is going to come after you. But even if you don’t win, you are screwing the person who created that image a little bit. The guy who took that photo of the Nuclear Plant is a professional photographer and he went out of his way to stage and take this shot. He was totally ok with you using his work however you wanted as long as you kicked him a couple bucks for his effort. So try not to abuse this little trick, ok you cheap bastard? And if your project makes money, pay the damn licensing fee! In fact, if you want to err on the side of caution, just pay the fee upfront so you don’t have to worry about it. There are some video contest sites that (falsely) claim that you transfer all copyrights to your videos as soon as you submit them. That’s complete B.S. and not at all legal but those contest sites are going to want you to play by their rules. So if you submit a video that includes unlicensed elements you might wind up blowing your chance to make a sale.
And now an ironic disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, an allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. So if you use an iStockPhoto in a video, that’s copyright infringement. But if I use iStockPhotos in an article about the site I’m protected by the first amendment.
VCN Sponsor Spotlight: 3/19/13
Usually when I do a “Sponsor Spotlight” I list what I think are the best current Mofilm, Poptent and Tongal contests. But this month I thought I’d change things up and post some recent winners from each site. First off, here’s the video that won the top prize in Mofilm’s Nestea: Sydney contest. Nestea was so happy with the videos they received that they’re running a bunch of them as web ads. The first place winner is amusing and the production values are really fantastic. I guess that’s what happens when video contest sponsors start offering big ass production grants!
First Place Winner. Prize: $8,000 and a trip for 2 to Sydney, Australia:
Ok, on to Poptent; 7UP Ten’s recent Poptent assignment was a big one. More than 1,000 filmmakers accepted the assignment and 151 videos were submitted. 7Up was only supposed to buy one video for $15,000 but I guess they liked what they saw because they bought 3 extra videos for $7,500 each.
Purchased by 7UP. Purchase Price: $15,000:
That was pretty clever. But I think I might like this other one just a little more:
Purchased by 7UP. Purchase Price: $7,500:
And finally, the results of Tongal’s MASSIVE Duplo contest were revealed about 2 weeks ago. Duplo wound up paying out more than $150,000 in prizes for this one. Here’s how the contest worked; during the idea phase, anyone could submit ideas for short videos about Duplo. The sponsors picked 50 ideas and gave each winner 100 bucks. Then came the pitch phase; Filmmakers applied for production grants so that they could each produce 5 of the 50 ideas 10 Filmmakers were selected and each received $3,000 so they could make their videos. Each filmmaker was guaranteed to win at least $6,000 in the video phase. The first place winner received $40,000 for their set of 5 videos. I can’t embed any of the winning videos so click the image below to see grand prize winner. If you want to see all 5 of the videos in this set, click on the little red arrow under the video when you get to Tongal.
First Place Winner. Prize: $40,000 for 5 videos:
Like I said, click this image to see all the videos in this set
“Occupy Conan” winners and full episode
Some day you may find yourself playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with your grand kids (or your 2nd gen clones) and to win the Entertainment wedge you’ll need to name the first TV show that ever aired a “crowdsourced” episode. The correct answer will be TBS’ “Conan” however “The Conan Show” or “The Conan O’Brian Show” should also be acceptable so long as your grand kids aren’t uptight a-holes.
Last fall Conan challenged his fans to recreate clips from a special episode of his show as part of an experiment he dubbed “Occupy Conan.” Team Coco selected the best submissions and edited them together to create a totally crowdsourced version. Technically this was a contest and if your clip made it to air you received a Team Coco swag bag. But the person who created the best clip (as judged by Conan and co.) would win a Volkswagen Beetle convertible plus $5,000. Here’s how Conan described the project:
“We posted an entire episode of CONAN online, then we asked our fans to let their imaginations run wild and recreate their favorite moments. We then stitched those moments together to create a bold, experimental, and potentially disorienting show we call OCCUPY CONAN. Thanks to everyone who participated — your amazing talent and creativity could very well transform the medium of television, or it could DESTROY it.”
The complete crowdsourced episode aired on January 31st and it is f&#%ing bananas. There are a lot of weird surprises but I won’t spoil any of them. The episode is online but I can’t embed it so CLICK HERE to watch it. I can post the amazing video that won the grand prize though so here it is:
Grand Prize Winner. Prize: A new VW Beetle convertible and $5,000:
I’ve been a Conan fan since forever but somehow I totally missed this contest. So I’m really hoping they run it again this fall. I think they probably will since this first installment turned out so well. Seriously, you need to set aside an hour this weekend and watch this episode. Its weirdness is almost hypnotic.
Folgers refuses to help contestants after their video uploader crashes
This lady is happy because she managed to upload her jingle before the site started freezing up
Believe it or not, Folgers’ 2011 Jingle contest was one of the popular video contests in history. According to the contest site, more than 3,000 entries were submitted and one lucky performer won $25,000. The coffee company brought the contest back this year and once again they asked musicians to create their new jingle. The songs could be done in any musical style; the only catch was that the new jingle needed to include the classic “The Best Part of Waking up….” melody and lyrics. Twenty Five grand is a hell of a lot of money and so as expected, the 2013 contest was a huge success. But in a way maybe it was a little too successful. Too many people tried to upload their videos at the last minute (and by “last minute” I mean the final 24 hours before the deadline) and a lot of entries never got through. People started to complain about the problem on Folgers’ facebook page the night before the deadline. Here’s a screenshot:
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But by the morning of the deadline, Folgers’ facebook wall was filling up with complaints. Someone from the company finally left a comment and posted a number for their “call center.” They said that someone at the call center would be able to help.
But of course no one at the call center knew how to fix an over-loaded website so calling the number didn’t do much good. One disgruntled contestant e-mailed me and explained what happened to him:
I tried on multiple browsers a full 24 hours before the deadline, nothing worked. Uploaded to yousendit and sent them the link, also posted the link on facbeook but they ignored it.
I called the number they posted, no help. They said “they’d give my contact info to the promotions department who would be in touch with me shortly.” They never got in touch. I asked to speak directly to the promotions department, they wouldn’t put my through. I tweeted to them, no response to my tweets. I wrote back on the facebook page (along with a lot of other people complaining) but they wouldn’t do anything to help us.
As the noon deadline approached, people started freaking out. Most of them had put a huge amount of time and energy into their entries and they were being screwed at the very last second by technical problems that were beyond their control. Apparently some people who called Folgers were told to try uploading their videos using Internet Explorer. That trick worked for some people but not for others. Folders’ facebook wall was soon slammed with comments from worried songwriters:
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A lot of people simply gave up and uploaded their videos to other sites. Then they posted links on Folgers’ facebook wall to prove they TRIED to upload their video before the deadline:
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I saw at least 5 posts like that and Folgers ignored them all. Finally, about 7 hours after the deadline had passed, Folgers announced that the entry period was over and if a video wasn’t accepted it was because it didn’t fit the contest guidelines or because contestants had experienced “browser and Internet connection problems.” So in the end they pushed all the blame onto the contestants and took no responsibility for their tech problems. As you can probably guess, this didn’t go over too well with some people:
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I didn’t personally enter the Folgers contest but I’ve been looking into this debacle and I’m positive that Folgers is 100% responsible for screwing up this contest.* Their video uploader sucked and that’s all there is too it. It wasn’t able to handle all the last minute submissions and it just crapped out and froze up. And if Folgers knew that everyone should use Internet Explorer to upload their entries, why the heck didn’t they say so right from the start? This is the 3rd time Folgers has run this contest and as I said, last time they got more than 3,000 entries. Didn’t anyone realize that hundreds and maybe thousands of people would try and submit videos on the day of the deadline?
Of course, I can understand technical difficulties….they happen. But Folgers’ reaction to these problems has simply been despicable. I’d estimate that dozens of people weren’t able to get their videos uploaded because of Folgers’ last minute glitches. Instead of trying to help these people, Folgers just threw up their arms and said basically said “Oh well! If you couldn’t get your video in it’s because YOU had a problem, not us!” That’s no way to run a promotion, a facebook page or a business. Folgers is supposed to announce a set of finalists this friday. Maybe they’ll come to their senses and un-screw all their unhappy fans by re-opening the uploader for a few hours before then.
*POST SCRIPT: It hit me that Folgers probably hired a third-party company to help them run their giant jingle contest. It looks like they did and that company seems to be Momentum Worldwide which is a part of McCann. Here’s how MW describes themselves:
Momentum Worldwide is the first and only marketing agency for the Phygital™ world and creates ideas that extend brand engagement with consumers through the interplay of experiences in both the physical and digital spaces. While the heritage of Momentum is built on live events and sponsorships, and our expertise now also spans sales promotion, sports, music and entertainment, shopper and digital marketing – we do not live in silos and are truly discipline-agnostic.
That has easily got to be the biggest load of marketing-speak bullshit I’ve ever seen. You know, it takes a certain kind of douche to come up with the word “phygital” but takes an even bigger douche to try and trademark the term. Momentum Worldwide’s facebook page says that they’re in Austin for SXSW right now. Guess that explains why they’re too busy to help the people that got screwed in the Folgers’ contest.
The simple magic of the Dollar Shave Club promo
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I read a lot of video contest briefs and lately I’ve see one particular video get referenced over and over and over; The Dollar Shave Club’s “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” promo. Here’s a snippit of a brief that I just happened to come across today:
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And hey, here’s another mention from a different contest brief:
Sexual humor will never be passé!!
All of these companies want their own Dollar Shave Club promo because the original is wacky and fun and it’s gone on to be a big viral hit. The promo was uploaded to youtube on March 6th, 2012 (holy sh*t that was one year ago today!) and over the last 365 days it’s been watched more than 9 million times. The video cemented the company’s image as fresh, hip and different (the words fresh, hip and different appear in a hell of a lot of contest briefs too) and DollarShaveClub.com actually started making a whole lot of sales. According to Wired, DSC’s newfound success even got them a 9.8 million dollar capital investment last fall.
So the ad was a monster success. But I think that there is another reason video contest sponsors like this video. It was cheap. Actually no…cheap is the wrong word. It was Low Budget and had a DIY vibe to it. It looks like it could have been shot for a video contest, doesn’t it? It just feels casual and cool and you get the feeling that the cast and crew probably had a lot of fun making it. It’s a little irreverent and a little tongue and cheek. It’s a commercial but it doesn’t feel like a commercial so viewers can share it with the friends and not feel like spammers. And finally, it explains exactly what the company does but it’s obvious that no one at DSC, not even the founder, takes themselves too seriously.
And that right there is the magic formula that all these companies want. They are looking for cool, hip, tongue in cheek videos that don’t take the brand too seriously and that has a sharable quality to it. No one anywhere can actually make a video that’s guaranteed to go viral. But if you know the ingredients your odds of writing something that has viral potential will be greatly increased.
So the next time you’re reading through a video contest brief, think about the Dollar Shave Club video. You shouldn’t flat out copy what DSC did (enough people have already done that) but instead you might want to try and capture the tone, style and attitude of the promo. And hey, just between you and me….if you’re ever submitting a pitch or applying for a production grant on a site like Tongal or Mofilm you might want to say something like “my video would have a Dollar Shave Club” vibe to it. It seems that “Dollar Shave Club” has become a magical phrase to marketing folks and anyone reading your application would realize that you understand exactly what kind of video they’re looking for.
Doritos says their Crash the Super Bowl facebook app was actually a huge success
Call me crazy but I think Frito-Lay’s PR department might have pitched a story idea to AdWeek as a response to an article I wrote just before the Super Bowl. On January 29th I posted this friendly critique of Doritos’ new Crash the Super Bowl facebook app: Did a poorly-designed Facebook app almost ruin this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest?
Here’s the TL;DR version of that article: Doritos’ new CTSB app suuuucked. Only 12 videos would load at a time so watching multiple entries was a complete hassle. (The old CSTB video galley was incredibly user-friendly. It was hosted on a dedicated website and hundreds of video thumbnails would load at a time.) The facebook app was also a spammy privacy killer. If you allowed the app, your facebook friends were bombarded with updates about your CTSB activities. I thought that I had selected the “Only Me” option but Doritos kept posting junk about me and I didn’t even realize it.
The was the first year that FritoLay ran The Crash on facebook. Coincidentally, it was also the first year that FritoLay saw a decrease in the number of entries they received. The 2011-2012 installment of the CTSB contest netted about 6,000 submissions. I did a quick and dirty count and this year it looks like fewer than 3,000 entries were uploaded. The prizes and rules were about the same so I blamed this 50% drop in participation on the crappy facebook app. Since fans weren’t able to watch a ton of low-quality entries, they weren’t inspired to go out and shoot better commercials of their own.
About a week after I posted my story, AdWeek ran their own article about the Crash the Super Bowl facebook app: Frito-Lay Likes the Data From Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl: Facebook-anchored effort hits 100 million views Have you ever read an article that breaks down the performance data of a Facebook app? Yeah, me either. I don’t think anyone at AdWeek would notice or care that The Crash had moved to Facebook. So someone on FritoLay’s PR team probably contacted a journalist-friend and pitched a positive story about the app to counter the bad press they had received (i.e., that brilliant a-hole Beardy’s story on VideoContestNews.com).
Here are the first few paragraphs of the AdWeek story:
Doritos’ decision to move its seventh annual “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign to Facebook proved to be a winner. The Frito-Lay brand—which had anchored the effort on a microsite in years past—drew nearly 100 million views for the five finalist videos in the user-generated contest, breaking its record.
“Almost every single metric of the program exceeded what we achieved during the last six years,” Ram Krishnan, vp of marketing at Frito-Lay, told Adweek. Krishnan said Facebook’s social nature helped the videos go viral. “That’s the whole reason why we switched,” he said. “People like to talk about the videos, and that reaches their circle of friends.”
What’s more, visits to its Facebook app page were up 100 percent compared to last year on the microsite, said Dena von Werssowetz, Frito-Lay marketing manager. Doritos’ Facebook fans increased substantially, von Werssowetz suggested, eclipsing the 4 million mark for the first time on the social site.
Her brand ran the full gamut of Facebook ads—Reach Block, Marketplace, Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts—to drive interest in the “Crash” initiative. (A spend figure wasn’t disclosed.) Around 3,500 videos were submitted from Oct. 8 through Nov. 16, 2012, via the brand’s Facebook app.
Her brand ran the full gamut of Facebook ads—Reach Block, Marketplace, Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts—to drive interest in the “Crash” initiative. (A spend figure wasn’t disclosed.) Around 3,500 videos were submitted from Oct. 8 through Nov. 16, 2012, via the brand’s Facebook app.
I’m pretty sure this article was the first time that FritoLay revealed how many entries were submitted this year. Like I said, I did a quick count and I only saw about 2,800 videos; and that’s the number I published in my original article. 3,500 just sounds way too high and I have a feeling that Doritos may have tweaked their finally tally a bit. Maybe the official figure includes duplicate entries that didn’t appear in the facebook gallery…or maybe I’m just bad at counting, I don’t know.
So anyway, the new CTSB facebook app didn’t suck….at least from a marketing standpoint. It did what it was supposed to do; it generated tons and tons and tons of free publicity for Doritos. 100 million views sounds like a ridiculously amazing accomplishment but these “views” aren’t really VIEWS. They are impressions. If you voted for one of the Crash the Super Bowl finalists, your facebook friends would see an alert in their news feed. If one of your friends scrolled past that alert, that counted as a “view.” So I’m guessing that most of these views were just junk traffic. But even if it wasn’t, a ton of free hits isn’t worth it if you annoy and inconvenience your target audience. The goal of the CTSB contest is to find great Doritos commercials. Are 100 million, 2-second long casual facebook views really worth it if the contest also experiences a 45% to 60% drop in the number of entries that are uploaded?
The AdWeek article is short and worth a read. But you’re probably feelin’ lazy today so I’ll just copy and paste one more bit of interesting info:
And it sounds likely that Doritos will run the “Crash” initiative again next year. “This is the best amplification of our brand narrative,” Klein said. “We just continue to be blown away by the creativity of Doritos fans.”
FritoLay probably wouldn’t let AdWeek run this line if they had any doubt about the future of the contest. So I think there almost certainly will be a 2013-2014 installment of the Crash the Super Bowl contest.
