Posts Tagged ‘deadline’

When will Doritos announce the 2013 Crash the Super Bowl contest?

Posted by Beardy on June 16th, 2012

Man, I haven't bought a bag of these in a while.

The start of the 2012-2013 NFL season is now just three months away so I think it’s finally time to start thinking about the new installment of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest.  Actually, I know that a lot of you guys have been thinking about the contest for months.  According to my traffic stats, during April and May, dozens of people a week visited VCN for the first time after googling phrases like “doritos commercial contest 2013” and “when does the Crash the Super Bowl contest start?”

So when will we know the details of the 2013 Crash?  Well, Fritolay keeps the details of the contest top secret until early fall.  Frankly, we don’t even know for sure if there will be a 2012-2013 installment of the CTSB contest.  But last year’s contest was a massively gigantic success; one fan-made Doritos commercial ( was ranked the best commercial of the year on USA Today’s ad meter and another CTSB ad () was ranked the best spot of the game in a (sort of bogus) facebook poll.  So two teams of filmmakers won million dollar bonuses and Doritos got a mountain of free publicity.  So I don’t think Doritos will be walking away from this incredibly successful franchise.  And why should they?  It’s been working great for them and each installment of the contest is bigger than the last.  Last year Doritos received about 6,000 submissions!  Can you imagine the backlash from their fans if they tried to skip the contest this year?

If the Crash is coming back for 2013, the planning has got to be well under way at Fritolay HQ.  But we probably won’t hear any details until the end of September.  Last year, Doritos launched the contest on September 27th, they started accepting entries on October 3rd and the deadline was November 21st.  So if they stick to the same timeline you’ve only got 5 1/2 months to work on your entries!!!  Better get crackin’, buddy!  Ok but seriously, you really should wait until the contest is actually announced before you start working on your ads.  Like I said, the 2013 installment isn’t a sure thing yet.  Plus you never know what kind of new twists Doritos could add to this year’s contest.  You don’t want to spend half the summer working on an epic commercial about Nacho Cheese Doritos only to find out in September that this year, Fritolay only wants ads about Cool Ranch Doritos.

VCN will let you know as soon as we hear any new details about the 2013 Crash the Super Bowl contest. If this is your first time visiting the site, be sure to bookmark us or subscribe to our blog feed!

 

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2010 Skinit.com entries

Posted by Beardy on June 4th, 2010

skinit

The deadline for Skinit.com’s big $50,000 video contest was Monday and it looks like they received at least 150 entries.  I say “at least” because filmmakers are still uploading videos 4 days after the deadline.  Skinit’s uploader is still active and it sends your video directly to the Skinit channel on youtube.  To Skinit’s credit, very few entries that were uploaded after the June 1st deadline have been approved and added to their official contest gallery.  But if you throw in the ineligible late entries, Skinit got about 175 submissions total.  That’s quite impressive and I hope it means Skinit will bring the contest back next year.  You can see all the videos that have thus far been uploaded here: 

Though I had been planning for months to enter the Skinit contest I sort of waited until the very last minute to get to work.  I finally settled on an idea about 2 weeks before the deadline which gave me just enough time to order and receive the skins I would need. If you remember, Skinit had 6 categories for this contest and one person in each category will win a $5,000 prize.  The categories were 60 and 30 second Consumer Electronics skin commercials, 60 and 30 second wall skin commercials and 60 and 30 second Tailgate Skins commercials.  I figured most people would enter the Consumer Electronics categories since those would be the cheapest and easiest ads to make.  So I decided to go for the tailgate category and I’m quiet proud of the final product.  All the actors I used are friends of mine and the shoot turned into an actual cookout.  Throw in a dancing horse-man and you have a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.  I wound up getting so much footage that I was able to do a 30 second and a 60 second version of the entry.  Here’s the 30 second version of my submission:

Skinit judges ultimately pick the winners but a piece of every contestants final score is based on votes.  So if you have 30 seconds to spare, why not do your pal Beardy a solid and throw a couple 5 star votes his way.  I could certainly use them.  Jerks have already been giving me 1-star ratings to bring my score down.

60 second ad:

30 second ad:

So how about you?  Did you enter the Skinit.com contest?  I really like seeing what kind of entries our readers are doing so if you entered and would like a little help schilling for votes, e-mail me a link or leave it in a comment and I will add it to this post.

Here’s a very good entry from Shane F.  I think this one is going to be a serious contender:

To rate Shane’s video, click here:

And here’s a funny musical entry from Johnathon M.  The chorus is quite catchy:

To rate Johnathon’s video, click here: 

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April video contest updates

Posted by Beardy on April 1st, 2010
Do a google image search for "April" and you'll get this and a ton of porn

Do a google image search for "April" and you'll get this and a ton of porn

April is finally here and two big contests have deadlines this month. The first is the perennial Taxslayer.com commercial contest with the hard-to-forget deadline of April 15th. There are two big prizes in this contest; first place gets $15,000 and second gets $5,000. The other deadline to remember this month is April 23rd. That’s for the Godaddy commercial contest. Godaddy’s giving away more than $175,000 in that one so you might want to ad it to your calendar.

Since both the taxslayer and godaddy contests require contestants to upload their videos to youtube, it’s really easy to check out the competition. So let’s see what’s been submitted so far.

Let’s start Taxslayer. According to that contest’s rules, contestants must upload their entries to youtube and tag them “Taxslayercontest2010.” Doing a search for that tag yields just ONE, solitary result. Here it is:

Remember for this one, contestants are required to submit both a 30 second and a 15 second version of their entry. You can watch the 15 second version of the above ad .

As we’ve mentioned before, Taxslayer lowered their prize amount and instituted some new rules this year. And it looks like those changes have scared everyone away. I had pretty much decided not to enter but if no one else is going to enter, maybe I should after all?

The Godaddy contest on the other hand has already received a whole bunch of entries. You can scroll through them all here: http://videos.godaddy.com/Super-Bowl-Video-Contest.aspx

But how about I save you a lot of time and just show you the three best entries so far. These three seem to be the only ones slick enough for TV:

EDIT:  Looks like I missed one.  Someone left a link to this entry in a comment.  It’s very slick but it’s kind of odd because it seems to be sort of a parody of the that godaddy produced:

As you can guess, a lot of crazy shit has been submitted too.  This video for instance is just plain WRONG. I think Chris Hanson needs to pay a visit to whoever came up with this idea:

If you shoot an entry for either the taxslayer or the godaddy contests and want to show off your work, e-mail us a link or just leave it in a comment below. We’ll post some more of our favorite entries later this month.

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Crash the Superbowl: 7 days to go

Posted by Beardy on November 2nd, 2009

Well, we’re getting down to it. If you haven’t shot your entry for the Crash the Superbowl contest but are still planning to do one then you are really cutting things close. About 460 entries have already been submitted so far and let me tell you people something….over the last few weeks I’ve watched every, single one of them! Well, technically I watched at least a few seconds of every entry. After about 5 seconds it’s pretty obvious which commercials are serious entries and which ones aren’t.

So after all these weeks and after watching hundreds of entries, here’s my big conclusion: There are some good spots but I wouldn’t be surprised if none of the videos so far posted make it to the finals. The quality of the submissions is going up and every day now, at least a few decent commercials appear on the site. But out of 460 entries, there isn’t one I would point to and scream, “winner!”

However, in the next 7 days, I’m guessing you’ll see at least 500 new videos get posted. Once it gets to the point that 100 videos a day are going up even I’ll probably have to give up trying to watch them all. Still, don’t let that big number scare you. Seven days is a long time and so if you have an idea, just go shoot it already!

The million dollar winners of last year’s Crash the Superbowl competition were recruited by Doritos to make some tutorial videos for contestants. They’re actually really great videos. If you’re new to video contests I recommend you watch them all. They’ll give you a lot of tips about how to tell a funny, fast, well-produced story in just 30 seconds:

1. Intro to the Crash:
2. Crush the Ad-Meter:
3. 30-Second Joke Telling:
4. Pro Spot on Crash Budget:
5. Copyrights and Wrongs:
6. Film Making 101:
7. Practice Makes Perfect:

Here’s my favorite installment:

30 Second Joke Telling

Good advice for any contest entry you plan on shooting. Keep it short and hilarious.

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