Last week the new video contest website Womadz.com launched their first official commercial contest.  It’s sponsored by Liberty Tax Service and there are some very nice prizes at stake.  The video that gets the most votes will win $10,000 and the video that gets the 2nd most votes will receive $2,000.  Then a panel of judges will select 3 winners and each of those videos will earn $2,000.  I suspect that some VCN readers may be hesitant to enter this one because some contests that involve online voting can get pretty ugly.  But the Womadz system has an interesting safeguard that should discourage people from cheating.  Womadz is going to select 20 voters at random and award them $50 each.  So if someone votes for themselves 1,000 times, some of their fake votes are probably going to win prizes.  And if a bunch of “people” don’t respond to respond to e-mails informing them that they just won 50 bucks (of if the e-mail addresses turn out to be fake) then the Womadz team is going to realize something fishy is going on.

So cheating probably won’t pay off in this contest.  I think whoever wins the grand prize is going to have to get it the old fashioned way….by begging for votes on facebook.  But the $50 voter prizes will probably make the begging process a whole lot easier.

To enter this contest, filmmakers need to create videos that are aimed at people who are  thinking about buying a Liberty Tax franchise.  The sponsor has come up with two basic ideas and contestants need to incorporate one of those ideas into their entry.  If you want to read the full contest brief, head here:  http://www.womadz.com/liberty-tax—45-days-to-ceo

The deadline for entries is November 5th so you’ve still got a few weeks to come up with an entry.  If you submit a video and need help getting votes, let me know (via ) and maybe I’ll give you a little plug on twitter or even here on the blog.

-