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Posts Tagged ‘contest’

The 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 Crash the Super Bowl finalists

If you want to win the Crash the Super Bowl contest you first need to understand what types of ads make the finals.  Doritos used to have all the past CTSB winners posted to a single youtube channel but for some dumb reason, those official videos have all been taken down.  So if you want to see all the winning ads you’re going to have to hunt for them all over youtube.  Or you could just scroll down because I did the hunting for you!  Links to every Doritos finalist from the past 7 years are below. I would have just embedded the videos but 35 embedded youtube videos in one post pretty much would crash my site.  So each ad is represented by a screenshot.  To watch the actual commercials, click on the images:
 

2012-2013 Doritos Finalists:

Goat 4 Sale by Ben Callner of Atlanta, GA
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

Goat 4 Sale

Fashionista Daddy by Mark Freiburger of Los Angeles, CA
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

Fashionista Daddy

Road Chip by Tyler Dixon of Los Angeles, CA
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

Road Chip

Express Checkout by Sasha Shemirani of San Diego, CA

Express Checkout

Fetch by Joe Taranto of Los Angeles, CA

Fetch

 

2011-2012 Doritos Finalists:

Man’s Best Friend by Jonathan Friedman of Virginia Beach, VA.
-Aired During the Super Bowl. WINNER: Million dollar USA Today ad meter bonus

Man’s Best Friend

Sling Baby by Kevin T. Willson of Los Angeles, CA.
-Aired During the Super Bowl. WINNER: Million dollar Facebook ad meter bonus

Sling Baby

Bird of Prey by Joby Harris of Los Angeles, CA.

Bird of Prey

Dog Park by Tyler Dixon of Liegh, UT.

Dog Park

Hot Wild Girls by Brad Scott of Denver, CO.

Hot Wild Girls

 

2010-2011 Doritos Finalists:

Pug Attack by JR Burningham of Burbank, CA.
-Aired during the Super Bowl. WINNER: Million dollar USA Today ad meter bonus.

Pug Attack

The Best Part by Tyler Dixon of Lehi, Utah.
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

The Best Part

Adam and Eve by Stephen Schuster of Topanga, CA.

Adam and Eve

Birthday Wish by Heather Kasprzak of Los Angeles, CA.

Birthday Wish

House Sitting by Tynesha Williams of Santa Monica, CA.
-Aired during the Super Bowl. WINNER: $400,000 ad meter bonus

House Sitting


2009-2010 Finalists:

Underdog by William Kyle Gerardi of Cary, NC.
-Aired during the Super Bowl. WINNER: $600,000 Ad Meter bonus.

Underdog

Snack Attack Samurai by Ben Krueger of Minneapolis, MN.
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

Snack Attack Samurai

The Smackout by Brendan Hayward of Santa Monica, CA.

The Smackout

Casket by Kevin Wilson of Whittier, CA.
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

Casket

House Rules by Joelle De Jesus of Los Angeles, CA.
-Aired during the Super Bowl.

House Rules

Kids These Days by Nick Dimondi of Cary, NC.

Kids These Days

 

2008-2009 Finalists:

Free Doritos by Joe Herbert of Batesville, IN.
-Aired during the Super Bowl. WINNER: Million dollar USA Today Ad meter bonus.

Free Doritos

New Flavor Pitch by Oren Brimer of New York, NY.

New Flavor Pitch

Power of the Crunch by Eric Heimbold of Venice, CA.
-Also aired During the Super bowl.

The Power of the Crunch

The Chase by Chris Roberts of Burbank, CA.

The Chase

Too Delicious by Michael Goubeaux of Los Angeles, CA.

Too Delicious

 

— 2007-2008: No Commercial contest —

 

2006-2007 Finalists:

Live the Flavor by Five Points Productions of Cary, NC.
-WINNER: Aired during the Super Bowl.

Live the Flavor

Check Out Girl by Kristin C. Dehnert of Los Angeles, CA.
-Also aired during the 2007 Super Bowl.

Checkout Girl

Mouse Trap by Billy Federighi of Beverly Hills, CA.
-Aired the next year during the 2008 Super Bowl.

Mousetrap

Chip Lover’s Dream by Jared Cicon of Claremont, CA.

A Chip Lover’s Dream

Duct Tape by Joe Herbert of Batesville, IN.

Duct Tape

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The ABCs of Death 2 is looking for its 26th director

That baby’s mom is super ugly

All of you aspiring horror directors should take note; a sequel to the 2102 anthology “The ABCs of Death” is in the works and once again the producers are running a contest to find one of the short films that will make up the movie.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, The ABCs of Death is broken up into 26 segments about kittens death.  Each segment is shot by a different director and has a theme connected to one of the letters of the alphabet.  When The first ABCs of Death was being made, the producers (Drafthouse Films) ran a contest to find the short that would represent the letter “T.”  The winner was this weird (and NSFW) claymation video entitled, “T is for Toilet.”
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This promo gives an entertaining explanation of how the contest works.  Warning: Like most video contest promos this one opens with a shot of a very loud screaming skull.
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I’m not really a horror guy so I’m probably not going to enter this one.  But I do like the concept so I figured I’d mention it.  This contest offers filmmakers a nice excuse to go out and shoot a high-quality short horror film.  So even if you lose, you still walk away with a decent film that you can send to festivals and add to your reel.  The deadline for this one is Halloween so you’ve got plenty of time to shoot something fancy.  Head here to read the official submission guidelines.
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Folgers announces their 2013 Jingle Contest winner

Folgers’ annual jingle contest doesn’t usually get much attention but it’s actually one of the biggest video contests in the world.  In 2011, the contest received more than 3,000 entries.  Now that I think about it, this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest only got about 3,000 submissions.  So it’s very possible that the 2013 Folgers Jingle contest was BIGGER than the 2013 Doritos contest.  That’s kind of surprising since Doritos literally offers millions of dollars in prizes in “The Crash” but Folgers only gives out one prize of $25,000.  Folgers probably gets so many entries because their contest is so easy to enter.  You don’t have to hire actors or write a script.  All you have to do is perform your own version of the classic “The Best Part of Waking Up…” jingle.  Oh my God.  Can you imagine being a judge in that contest?  I’d never want to drink a drop of coffee again after hearing thousands of people perform the same song over and over and over.

The judges that didn’t go insane selected and announced a slate of 10 finalists back in March.  Then there was a month-long public voting period.  But…votes didn’t actually determine the winner in this contest.  The judges made the final pick and contests just got a few extra points if they did well in the voting.  The winning musician is named Sawyer Frye and he’s from Carthage, NC.  Here’s his video:

Folger’s Grand Prize Winner.  Prize: $25,000:

Holy crap.  Wait a second, that was sort of amazing, wasn’t it?  I just now realized that I recognized the guy who won that contest.  Last fall I did a blog post about a music video he did that won a contest sponsored by FireHouse subs.  His FireHouse entry was so good that I said something like “If this guy keeps entering contests he’s going to make a fortune.”  Guess I was right about something for a change!

Folgers really milked this contest and they made all of the finalists appear in little biographical videos.  If you want to watch any of these or if you want to see the other nominated jingles, head here.

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What is Vote Farming?

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Last week I posted a story about a man who lost a $100,000 contest prize after he was disqualified for “vote farming.”  The ex-winner was a lawyer and he was considering a lawsuit because he felt the contest’s official rules were ambiguous and vague.  He did get the most votes but it seems he didn’t get the right kind of votes.  Here’s what the rules actually said:

“offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, vote farming, or any other activity that artificially inflates such finalists votes as determined by sponsor in its sole discretion.”

While I was writing my story about the disqualified lawyer I tried to look up the definition of “vote farming” but I apparently there isn’t one.   Seriously.  Wikipedia, the Urban Dictionary and 10 pages of google results turned up nothing.  It seems to be a brand new term that has just started to appear in online contest rules.  Since I’m pretty familiar with the concept behind Vote Farming I thought I’d offer a definition of my own:

Vote Farming:  The practice of earning votes in an online contest by trading votes with friends or strangers who are competing in other online contests.

How Vote Farming Works:  One contestant will post voting instructions and a link to their entry on a “Vote Exchange” website, Facebook page or forum.  A second contestant will vote for that entry.  They will then post a screen shot or a vote number as proof that they voted.  They will also post their own contest link.  The original poster will “Return the Favor” (RTF) and vote for the other person’s entry.  After the swap is complete, each contestant has gained one vote in their respective contest and they have each cast one vote for someone else.  The more votes a person casts, the more votes they gain.

Here’s an example of a “Vote Request” looks like:

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I’ve tried Vote Swapping myself and I’ve found it to be a very successful (but time consuming) tactic.  There’s a whole online community of people who win lots of contests thanks to Vote Swapping.  A hardcore Vote Swapper will spend hours and hours and hours voting for other people’s entries and they can earn hundreds of votes a week.  This practice has presumably been dubbed “Vote Farming” because it’s very similar to a tactic known as “Gold Farming.”  Gold Farmers are people who repetitively play Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing games (like World of Warcraft) just to collect gold or weapons that they can sell to other players for real money.  Selling in-game items for real cash is usually against the rules.  A player can gold farm for themselves but the practice violates the spirit of the game.  And the same thing goes for Vote Farming.  When a contestant gains a ton of votes thanks to vote swapping, they aren’t really doing anything unethical.  All of their votes are coming from real people so it’s hard to argue that a Vote Farmer is a cheater.  But trading votes goes against the spirit of an online contest.  The technique is kind of like a cheating loophole.  Yes, all the votes are real but they’re junk votes.  Companies use online voting in their contests because they want to generate more traffic or facebook likes.  But a vote from a Vote Swapper is junk traffic.  The Swapper doesn’t pay attention to the content.  They just vote as fast as they can and then move on.

And that’s why a lot of sponsors are now banning Vote Farming.  They can get away with calling it cheating because the contestant is technically offering an “inducement” to get a stranger to vote for their entry.  If you’re in an online contest and you’re thinking of trying Vote Swapping be sure to READ THE RULES before you start.  If the rules say that you can’t trade votes, don’t do it.  I’ve heard several stories about contestants who were disqualified because they got caught posting their entry in a Vote Swapping forum.  So if you’re going to swap, swap with caution.

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When will Doritos announce the 2014 Crash the Super Bowl contest?

Doritos’ new look for 2013

This summer I’m taking a trip to New Orleans and a few nights ago I stayed up late looking at flights and hotels.  When I finally went to bed, I had a nightmare.  I dreamed that I was walking down Bourbon Street with my friends and it was a nice hot sunny day.  But then I started to notice something strange.  Everyone in the city was putting up Christmas decorations.  They were stringing lights up above us and hanging wreaths from the balconies.  I flipped out and started running around yelling at everyone Twilight Zone-style, “What are you people doing!?  It’s too soon!  Christmas is seven months away!  It’s too soon for this!  It’s summer time!!!”

That dream has been on my mind today because I’ve been trying to decide if it’s too soon to start posting about this year’s Crash The Super Bowl contest.  Like Christmas, Doritos season seems to begin earlier and earlier every year.  It used to be that I’d start getting e-mails about The Crash after the 4th of July.  But over the last few weeks a good number of people (online and in the real world) have asked me about this year’s contest. So even though the last installment ended only about 3 months ago, I figured I’d do a post and answer two frequently asked questions:

Q:  Is Doritos doing the Crash the Super Bowl contest again this year?  A:  Frankly, I don’t know.  Doritos always keeps a tight lid of the details of the contest.  But I’d be willing to bet 10 bags of Cool ranch chips that the Crash will return this fall.  A few days after the Super Bowl, Ad Week ran a story about how thrilled FritoLay was with the “data” from the 2012-2013 CTSB contest.  The article concluded with this statement:

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.”

I’m guessing the rep from Fritolay dropped a lot of off-the-record hints during his interview but the reporter wasn’t allowed to come out and confirm that the contest would come back for 2014.

 Q:  When will Doritos announce the contest?  A:  FritoLay usually announces the details of The Crash in different stages.  Last year they announced on September 6th that they were going to officially announce the contest on September 18th.  Then when the 18th arrived FritoLay announced that the contest would begin on October 8th.

So if Doritos sticks to the same schedule (they usually do) we still have about 4 months before we learn whether or not the contest is coming back this year.  That might seem like a long ways away but 4 months isn’t really a ton of time.  So I don’t think it’s too soon to start thinking about ideas and making tentative plans.  I have a good feeling about this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest and I’m looking forward to it.  About 6 weeks ago, Doritos officially changed the design of all of their bags.  They haven’t updated their designs since 2006 and that just happened to be the first year the CTSB contest was launched.  I sort of hated those bright red, shiny bags.  They were a real bitch to light.  These new bags look a little less reflective so they’ll look nicer on camera.  Now that I think about it, Doritos will need to create new video “end tags” for the Crash the Super Bowl contest since this logo…..

RIP Orange thingy that sort of looks like a sound wave

has been retired.  Man, maybe this year FritoLay will decide to freshen up the whole CTSB tool kit and provide filmmakers with a “Doritos Crunch” sound effect that doesn’t sound so creepy and fake!

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“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.
 

Need contest votes? Try VoteRequests.com

This ain’t your first day on the Internet so I’m not going to waste your time or insult your intelligence by explaining what “vote swapping” is.  If you’ve ever entered a video contest that uses a public vote to determine the winner you’re probably already a vote swapping pro.  The other day I heard from the friendly dude who runs the new vote swapping site VoteRequests.com and I thought I’d give him a quick plug-a-rooni.  On V.R. you just post a link to your contest and other people in other contests vote for you.  Then you pay those people back by voting for them in their contest.  Oh shit.  I said I wasn’t going to explain vote swapping but I just did.  Anyway, go post your entries on that site and win some money and then paypal me a cut as a thank you.  40% is acceptable but 60% is preferred.
 

Vote for my pal ANNA H. in Butterfinger’s Last Spokesperson on Earth contest!

Butterfinger, she’s your girl!

A few weeks back I shot an entry for Butterfinger’s last spokesperson on Earth video contest but I didn’t make the finals. But it turns out that my friend Anna DID manage to make the top 5. Anna’s a very talented musician from Chicago and I’m happy to say that I introduced her to the world of video contests. She writes and performs amazing and catchy little songs and I think if she gets hooked she’s going to wind up winning a lot of contests. The Butterfinger contest had a really weird theme; contestants were supposed to demonstrate a talent and show what an effective spokesperson they would be after aliens invade during the Mayan Apocalypse in December 2012. The concept is totally insane but Anna managed to write an absolutely beautiful song about Butterfingers and the end of the world.

The winner of the Butterfinger competition is determined by facebook votes so Anna could use your support.  To vote for her, just follow this link and scroll down past the promo video.  You’ll see 5 thumbnails.  Click on the one that says Anna H. and vote.  I totally slacked off on this request and midnight on Monday the 27th is the voting deadline so cast a vote while you still can. Thanks!


 


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