Posts Tagged ‘USA today’

Sling Baby “Wins” Facebook ad meter poll and a million bucks thanks to unsportsmanlike conduct

Posted by Beardy on February 8th, 2012

I call Shenanigans! Sling Baby's "head of social media" calls on fans to attack their competition.

On Tuesday night, filmmaker and three-time Crash the Super Bowl finalist Kevin T. Willson became the fourth person ever to win the million dollar ad meter bonus in Doritos’ annual commercial contest.  But unlike the other three times directors have won that honor, Willson’s victory isn’t anything worth celebrating.  In fact, the way he “won” his bonus money is so shameful I think his win might wind up being a black mark on the reputation of the entire field of “crowdsourced” advertising.

As I explained in my last post, this year USA Today ran TWO versions of their annual Super Bowl ad meter poll.  The traditional poll got its scores from viewers in private focus groups and the results were released on Sunday night.  This year, USA Today’s focus groups declared the Crash the Super Bowl entry “” to be the best commercial of the game.  (A great call, BTW)  As is tradition, Doritos will award a bonus of one million dollars to the creator of Man’s Best Friend for pulling off such an amazing feat.

But USA Today’s second ad meter poll was touted as a chance for “the public” to rank the commercials of Super Bowl 46.  The poll was run online and voting was open to anyone with a facebook page.  Voters were able to score a video on a scale of one to five stars.  Way back when the 2011/2012 installment of the CTSB contest was launched, Doritos said that they would be giving out bonus prizes to any CTSB ad that landed in the top three of either USA Today ad meter poll.  (one million dollars for first, $600K for second, $400K for third)  Voting in the online ad meter ended last night and when all was said and done, Kevin Willson’s Crash the Super Bowl ad, “Sling Baby,” managed to come out on top.
 

 
So this year, Fritolay gets to boast that Doritos commercials took the #1 spot in both of USA Today’s ad meter polls.  But the new facebook ad meter poll is set up and run in such a way that virtually guarantees that a Crash the Super Bowl ad will land “in the money.”  The other 55 ads in the poll have nothing to gain financially by doing well so only the Sling Baby team seriously FOUGHT for first place.  So I think fritolay knew a Doritos ad would probably win the facebook poll all along.  However, I don’t think they ever could have guessed that the final score would be so lopsided that the results would make the entire facebook ad meter look like an unfair, illegitimate joke.  Check this out; here’s a shot of the Facebook ad meter scores as they were just a few hours after the Super Bowl ended:

Online ad meter standings: Sunday Night

On Sunday night, the CTSB commercial that won the traditional ad meter was also winning the online poll.  Actually, the top 5 ads on this poll are just a jumbled version of the results of the traditional ad meter.  So before the Sling Baby crew started voting, the facebook poll was actually a pretty fair indicator of how “the public” felt about the ads that aired during the big game.  But here’s what the scores looked like by Monday afternoon.

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Sing Baby had shot into first place but that was no surprise. However, the plummeting scores of the other videos in the top five were a little suspicious. As for the Kia commercial, it featured Motley Crue and it turns out the band kept and to vote for their ad. So that’s why that spot jumped into the Top 5. I guess the Sling Baby team didn’t appreciate that someone else was trying to win the ad meter poll. Here’s how the rankings looked at 1:15 on Tuesday afternoon:

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The Kia ad had been slapped down hard. Just 20 minutes after I took that screen shot I checked the rankings again. The Kia ad’s score was down to 4.22 and it had fallen out of the top 5.  So the only commercial that seemed to actually be trying to beat Sling Baby was mysteriously crushed in the voting over night.

Here now are the final scores of USA Today’s Facebook Ad Meter Poll:

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When voting started, Sling Baby was in a three way tie for first place with Man’s Best Friend and Bud Light’s Weego.  But after two days of voting, Sling Baby wound up absolutely slaughtering the competition.  Though I use the word “competition” lightly.  I did see a few casual requests for votes from some of the other competitors, but I think most companies realized that an online ad meter was sort of meaningless.  For the Sling Baby team, winning a 56-way contest that almost no one else was really trying to win should have been a piece of cake.  And Doritos even helped their cause.  After Man’s Best Friend won the big ad meter contest on sunday, Doritos started encouraging their fans to head to the online poll and vote for Kevin Willson’s Sling Baby.  I think it’s insanely, amazingly awesome that the folks at Fritolay want to give one of their CTSB winners a million dollars.  Sure, it’s good publicity for them but still, it was a really gracious move.  With Doritos’ support, Kevin Willson and his teammates could have scored a spot in the Top 3 without breaking a sweat.  But unfortunately, winning $600,000 or $400,000 fair and square apparently wasn’t good enough for these folks.  I kept track of the ad meter for the last three days and it seems that Sling Baby won because a small army of supporters sabotaged the scores of the other ads in the poll by maliciously rating them 1 star out of a possible 5.

If you look at Sling Baby’s official facebook page, you’ll only see a few subtle hints that the team wanted people to down-vote the other ads in the poll.  Here’s one example I saw:

Screenshot of the "Vote For Sling Baby" facebook page

Just for the record, Willson’s “User Generated ad” was created by a team of more than 40 pro and semi-pro filmmakers and cost almost $3,000 to produce. But anyway, as you can see, whoever was running that facebook page was really pushing the idea that their team had to beat Budweiser, M&Ms, Kia, etc.  And one fan even flat out said he was rating the other videos one-star.  And yet, no one spoke up and said “Hey man, we don’t want to win that way.  Please only give honest scores.”

But that was how thing’s went down on Sling Baby’s official page.  Behind the scenes, the Sling Baby team felt free to get ruthless.  Based on what I have seen, it seems that some team members decided they could only win if they played dirty.  The creators of Sling Baby were incredibly organized and they even had someone managing their online campaigns.  That person’s name is Nate Daniels and the “About Us” section of Vote4SlingBaby.com lists him as being in charge of “Social Media.”  But apparently he also helped come up with the idea for the entry.  Daniels did an interview with something called the Lansing City Pulse in which he talked about his role on the team:

Daniels, who moved to Los Angeles, teamed up with the director of the ad, Kevin Wilson, to create the commercial. “I helped create the idea for ‘Sling Baby,’ and am in charge of the online campaign and the website,” Daniels said.

And here he is doing a TV interview with a Lansing, MI news station about Sling Baby’s quest to win the facebook ad meter.  So Daniels was a key member of the Sling Baby team.  He was literally the guy in charge of spreading the word about the ad and I assume that he was the head of the “online campaign” to get votes for the commercial.  At first Daniels simply asked people to vote for his team’s ad.  But as the Sling Baby slipped in the polls, he started to hint that people should give bad scores to the competition:

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But soon enough, Daniels dropped the innuendo and just started instructing people to rate the competing ads “1 star.”  In an absolutely despicable move, he even told told people to give a bad score to the other Doritos commercial, Man’s Best Friend:

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Daniels was by no means the only person using Facebook or Twitter to get Sling Baby fans to give bad scores to the other commercials in the ad meter. I found a bunch of other examples that I could post. But the people who made those requests weren’t in charge of Sling Baby’s social media campaigns so I’m not going to repost their comments.  I’m only sharing what Nate Daniels did because it was his job to promote Sling Baby online.

Now, if you’re thinking that perhaps this one team member went rogue and did all this without the OK of his teammates….well, take a look at this:

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Jeff Edwards was the Executive Producer of Sling Baby.  Not only that, Edwards was Kevin Willson’s “plus one” for the trip to the Super Bowl.  So Edwards was practically a co-finalist.  He got a free trip to beautiful Indianapolis, he got to watch the Super Bowl from Fritolay’s private box and I’m going to guess that he stands to receive a huge slice of the million dollar ad meter prize.  So this guy should have known better than to publicly call on people to give bad scores to the Bud Light, Kia and Chrysler ads. As Captain Hook would say, that’s just bad form. Even Motley Crue didn’t tell people to down-vote the other videos and they are literally a motley crew!

Over the years I have been in a lot of video contests where votes determine the winners.  And I always make it a point to tell my family and friends NOT to down-vote the competition.  That just seems like a skeezy and unfair way to win a contest.  So it simply blows my mind that (as far as I saw) not one Sling Baby team member responded to Daniels or Edwards by saying, “Dude, chill out…we want to win fair and square.“  Though I didn’t see any evidence that Kevin Willson was asking people to sabotage the scores of the other videos in the contest, I think it’s incredibly unlikely that he didn’t know what his friends and teammates were up to.  And yet, it looks like he did nothing to stop these sad, unsportsmanlike tactics.

And that might be because he knew those tactics would work. Just look at how the scores for the other top videos tumbled during the voting.  Even Man’s Best Friend, the REAL best commercial of Super Bowl 46 went from first place to sixth place in just 48 hours.  That just shows you how effective “down-voting” can be.  Every high school graduate knows that you can get an A+ on every test but just one F per semester will wreck your final grade.  My point is that negative scores have a much bigger impact than positive scores do.  Let’s do some quick math:  Imagine a commercial on the ad meter had 10 votes of 4 stars each.  That would make their score 4.00.  If a person casts an 11th vote of 5 stars, the video’s score goes up to 4.09.  But if that person casts an 11th vote of 1 star, that video’s score plummets to 3.72.  Winning by down-voting the competition was probably easy but it was also certainly wrong.  But I guess the promise of a million god damn dollars can make people do some pretty crooked things.  To me it looks like some members of the Sling Baby team decided that it was their mission to make sure Willson’s commercial came in first by any means necessary.  And those folks straight up accomplished the hell out of that mission.
 

 
Right about now you might be wondering, “What’s the big deal?  So these guys did what it took to win a million bucks…what do you care?  It’s not your money.”  Well the reason this is a big deal because the Sling Baby crew completely violated the spirit of this competition.  I could win a hundred yard dash if my friends ran onto the track and tackled all the other runners, but that wouldn’t prove that I was the fastest guy in the race.  And I sure as hell wouldn’t be proud if someone gave me a gold medal for my phony baloney victory.  The point of the ad meter poll is to be ranked the best because your commercial IS the best….not because you got a whole bunch of people to give bad scores to the other ads.  Not only is that unsportsmanlike, I think it borders on fraud.  If the Sling Baby team launched a coordinated effort to get hundreds of people to LIE so that they could win this contest then they could be facing some serious legal repercussions.  And yes, when those voters gave bad scores to all the other videos in the contest they were LYING….they were not scoring the other commercials honestly.  I think this whole debacle could and should be investigated by the legal departments of Fritolay, USA Today, Kia, Budweiser, M&Ms, etc, etc, etc.  But at the very least, the down-voting could result in Sling Baby being completely disqualified from the Crash the Super Bowl contest.  Here’s what the official rules of the contest say about unsportsmanlike conduct:

Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to disqualify any individual deemed to be (a) tampering or attempting to tamper with the entry process or the operation of the Contest or any Sponsor or Contest-related Web Site; (b) violating the Official Rules; (c) violating the Web Site terms of service, conditions of use and/or applicable general rules or guidelines; or (d) acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner, or with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any other person. This Contest is offered only in the United States and is governed by the laws of the state of Texas. All claims relating in any manner to this Contest or to any Submission must be resolved in the federal or state courts located in Collin County, Texas.

Now that I think about it, if key members of the Sling Baby team were willing to resort to such unscrupulous measures to win the million dollar ad meter prize, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect that maybe they did some unscrupulous things to get enough votes to ensure their ad would air during the Super Bowl.  Again, I think that’s something the big wigs at Fritolay can and should look into.

Finally, there is one more reason why all this matters:  Crowdsourcing, video contests and consumer generated ads already don’t get a lot of respect from the pros in the advertising world.  Every time a twenty dollar, homemade commercial like “Man’s Best Friend” beats Madison Avenue’s multi-million dollar commercials, the entire ad industry looks bad.  But Sling Baby’s “win” on the facebook ad meter gives the pros a reason to dismiss the accomplishments of crowdsourcers everywhere.  Sling Baby makes it look like we can only win when we’re playing with a stacked deck.  And even worse, the ridiculous results of the facebook ad meter make all of us look like greedy, vindictive cheaters.  Oh, but just for the record, down-voting the other ads technically wasn’t cheating since their were no rules and the ad meter wasn’t even an actual “contest.”  But if people were giving bad scores to the other commercials on the ad meter just to help Sling Baby win, that would be unethical.  And winning a million dollars unethically is nothing to be proud of.

Two final notes:  First, all the facebook screenshots that appear in this post come from public facebook pages that anyone can access. However, I didn’t think it would be necessary or appropriate to actually link to those pages. Second, the website AdBowl.com also ran an online poll where the public could rate the commercials of Super Bowl 46.  There were no prizes or bragging rights at stake in that poll so no one tried to sway the outcome of that contest.  According to people of the Internet, the two best commercials of the game were Volkswagen’s Dog Strikes Back and Doritos’ Man’s Best Friend.  As for Sling Baby, it came in 6th.

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Dueling Caskets (full of Doritos!)

Posted by Dan on February 8th, 2010
Image from one of Doritos' Crash the Super Bowl winners; Casket

Image from one of Doritos' Crash the Super Bowl winners; Casket

Back in October, I wrote, directed and edited an entry for Doritos’ annual Crash the Superbowl contest entitled, “Rest in Chips.”  My commercial was about a dead guy who’s last wish was to be buried in a casket full of Doritos but to the surprise of everyone at his funeral, it turns out he faked his death and is alive inside the casket of chips that eventually gets knocked over.  Sound familiar?  It might if you watched the Super Bowl last night.  Because during the first quarter of the big game, Doritos aired the three winners of the Crash the Super Bowl contest and the third winning ad they showed just happened to be about a dead guy who’s last wish was to be buried in a casket full of Doritos but to the surprise of everyone at his funeral, it turns out he faked his death and is alive inside the casket of chips that eventually gets knocked over!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t MY fake-funeral/Casket-full-of-Doritos-that-gets-knocked-over entry.  It was another entry called “Casket” and it was created by a team of filmmakers from a “non-denominational megachurch” in LA called Mosaic that’s popular with aspiring filmmakers and actors. The church is headed by a well known author, producer and self-professed leader named Erwin Mcmanus and he funded the production of “Casket.”  (you can read about Mosaic and their Crash the Superbowl aspirations here)  Here’s their ad:

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I’m sorry to say it but I suspect that the team that made “Casket” may have stolen several of their ideas from me.  How can that be?  Well first, here is the entry that I created for the Crash the Super Bowl contest, “Rest in Chips:”

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Sure, they’re not on the same level technically, but there are so many similarities between the stories of “Casket” and “Rest in Chips” that I’ve had a hard time accepting that they’re just coincidences.  If you ignore the aesthetic differences between the two entries (camera quality, location, music) you’ll see that they share many common key elements.  (The kind of stuff you’d see in the scripts for each spot)  Really, the only significant difference in the two stories is WHY the two “dead” guys each decide to fake their deaths.  Other than that, in just 30 seconds, both ads manage to feature:

1. A dead man’s last wish to be buried in a casket full of Doritos

2. A “dead” man who turns out to actually be alive

3. A fake funeral orchestrated by the “dead” man as part of a nefarious scheme

4. A framed photo of the “dead” guy enjoying a bag of Doritos next to the casket

5. Shots of that guy in his casket buried up to his face in chips

6. Unsuspecting mourners who scream/gasp in surprise when the hoax is revealed

7. A climax in which the “dead” guy gets his comeuppance when the casket of chips is knocked over

That’s a lot for just 30 seconds, isn’t it!?  Well, the coincidences don’t stop there.  As it turns out, all of those elements can also be found in this crude animated storyboard that I made weeks before I went out and shot my entry:

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Yeah…see where I’m going with this?  I created that storyboard as a test to see if I could fit all the dialogue and action into 30 seconds.  Then I posted it to youtube so that I could send the link to friends so they could give feedback on the idea.  The above version was posted to youtube on October 12th, 2009.  But that is actually the second version.  I posted the first version of the storyboard video on October 6th and named it “Doritos Storyboard.”  After about a week, a friend actually said to me, “aren’t you worried that another contestant could see that and steal your idea?”  I realized he was right and that I had made a dumb mistake.  Because the video was named “Doritos Storyboard,” any prospective Crash the Superbowl contestant who went to youtube to watch last year’s winning entries or other Doritos-related videos for inspiration could have seen my storyboard.  In fact, it would have appeared at the top of the page if the results were “sorted by date.”  So I pulled the original version and replaced it with the generically named “Dortest” version around October 12th.

The funeral photo used in "Casket"

The funeral photo used in "Casket"

A week or so after the submission period for the Crash the Superbowl contest closed, I saw “Casket” and I was flabbergasted.  I remembered the storyboard on youtube and immediately suspected that I had been ripped off.  I had to do something about it so I did what any self-respecting dork would do.  I blogged about it. I first compared the two ads in this blog post from November 19th:  A Tale of Two Caskets (full of Doritos.) Since “Casket” was so slickly produced, I was worried right from the start that it might make it to the finals.  So while Doritos was still evaluating all 4,000+ entries they received, I e-mailed them my concerns on December 9th.  They responded to my e-mail and said the company’s “legal team” would look into it.

Since the official rules said that Doritos judges were supposed to assign each entry a score, and since 40% of that score was supposed to be based on “originality and creativity,” I assumed that even if there wasn’t plagiarism, I uploaded my casket-full-of-doritos entry to the contest site first, so logically, that would impact “Casket’s” originality score.  And in a competition with 4,000+ submissions, the Top 6 videos would probably be decided by just fractions of a point.  So losing even a few originality points would end an entry’s chances of winning, right?

Boy was I wrong about that one.  On January 5th, 2010, “Casket” was announced as one of Doritos’ 6 CTSB finalists.  And man, let me tell you, I flipped the F%^& out.  I wasn’t just mad because a team of filmmakers that may have ripped me off had just won $25,000 and a trip to the Super Bowl, though.  In a way, I was much more upset with Doritos.  They knew that somewhere out there a filmmaker suspected that the “Casket” team had plagiarized his entry/storyboard.  There were tons and tons of awesome videos submitted to this year’s competition. Why did they have to pick the one video that they knew would drive some poor guy crazy and maybe even get them into legal trouble!?

The funeral photo used in "Rest in Chips"

The funeral photo used in "Rest in Chips"

A single question has been on my mind since I first saw “Casket” back in November.  “When did they come up with that idea?”  Obviously the entry was a very elaborate production.  Maybe they had spent months working on the thing.  If it turned out that the team came up with the concept for their entry prior to say, the start of October, then there was no chance they could have stolen the concept from me….unless they were mind readers.

I’m not insane and I’m not some jerk who likes ruining other people’s moments of glory.  I absolutely, positively do not want to paint anyone as plagiarists if they’re totally innocent.  I also really do not want to put my life on hold while I engage in a copyright battle with a megachurch and a multinational corporation if I don’t have to.  In the last few weeks I have exchanged many e-mails with FritoLay and the lawyer for the “Casket” team (yes…they already got a lawyer and it seems like he was hired just to deal with this issue.) I have asked them over and over and over and over to PLEASE, send me some kind of documents, materials or other proof that “Casket” was an independent creation that wasn’t wrongfully derived from my works.  My sincere hope has been that someone would want to provide me some kind of evidence that would put me, and my family and friends who support me, at ease.  I would have been happy just to see some copies of some e-mails that showed that their idea pre-dated the creation of my script for “Rest in Chips.”  If they could prove they were innocent, or even just offer a credible explanation, then I could apologize, drop the whole thing and move on with my life.

The beautifully drawn funeral photo from the storyboard video for "Rest in Chips"

The beautifully drawn funeral photo from the storyboard video for "Rest in Chips"

But even though the filmmakers behind “Casket” have known for weeks, and probably even months that some crackpot out in the suburbs of Chicago was accusing them of plagiarism they have not done one thing to counter my claims.  I have asked repeatedly for some shred of proof that they weren’t guilty of ripping me off.  But according to their lawyer, they don’t want to give me ammunition in case I sue them.

Let’s cut the BS here.  If there was some A%&hole running around the Internet, endangering my commercial’s chances of airing during the Superbowl and telling Doritos and the rest of the world that I might have stolen some of their ideas, you know what I’d do?  I’d shut that guy down immediately with a big facefull of proof.  I’d e-mail the guy and tell him he was full of s%^&.  I’d write my own blog posts and fill them with proof that my works were independent creations.  For God’s sakes, I’d offer to take a lie detector test if the guy wanted me to!  I would immediately do whatever it took to shut down a false accusation of plagiarism against me.

Now what I wouldn’t do is hire a lawyer if I had nothing to hide and I certainly wouldn’t keep my “proof” hidden from the world.  I think the thing that most makes me believe that I was ripped off is the fact that none of these people have ever contacted me to simply say “You’re wrong, and here’s why….”

The other thing that makes me think I was ripped off are the cold, hard, dirty facts.

Alive in a casket full of Doritos. From "Casket"

Alive in a casket full of Doritos. From "Casket"

Here are my facts:  I wrote my script for “Rest in Chips” around October 1st.  I created an awesome-looking animated storyboard based on my script and first uploaded it to youtube on October 6th. That video could have been seen by anyone searching for Doritos-related videos up until about October 12th.  I shot my entry on October 25th, I posted my first rough cut to the web on October 28th and I uploaded my final entry to the Crash the Super Bowl contest site around November 5th.

Because Doritos and the Mosaic team would not even tell me WHEN the idea for “Casket” was born, I decided to do some digging myself.  And by “digging” I mean I just read the articles that showed up in my google alert notices.  The information below all comes from interview quotes from members of the “Casket” team.  These are my sources (1) (2) (3) (4)  Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few weeks:

1.  The idea for “Casket” was first suggested in a Mosaic pitch meeting that seems to have taken place in early October, probably around October 9th.

2.  The idea for “Casket” was pitched by one member of the group.  The group decided to shoot the idea and the person who suggested the idea then “wrote the original script.”

3. At least 4 other people are credited as having co-written or contributed to the script for “Casket.”

4. “Casket” was shot in one day on November 1st and the entry was uploaded just before the deadline on November 9th.

Alive in a Casket full of Doritos. From "Rest in Chips"

Alive in a Casket full of Doritos. "Rest in Chips"

As I said, members of the “Casket” team shared all of this information during interviews so unless they all lied to several reporters, the above points are facts.  And these facts line up perfectly with my theory of how I may have been plagiarized.  FritoLay has had a timeline of when I created the various incarnations of my Crash the Superbowl entry since mid-December.  I explained weeks ago that I wrote my script shortly after the Crash the Superbowl contest began and then created an animated storyboard version of my script and uploaded it to youtube on October 6th.

For roughly a week, the storyboard was on youtube and could be seen by anyone doing a search for videos tagged “Doritos.”  The “Casket” team has gone on record stating that from the day they decided to shoot an entry for this contest to the day they uploaded their video, only a month had gone by.  That means that their pitch meting seems to have happened right at the time my storyboard was visible on youtube.

Alive in a casket full of Doritos. From the video storyboard for "Rest in Chips"

Alive in a casket full of Doritos. From the video storyboard for "Rest in Chips"

I find it very hard to believe that not one member of a large, well-organized team of professional filmmakers went to youtube before their pitch session to research last year’s winning entries and watch other Doritos related videos.  I have known about the Mosaic pitch meeting for a while and my theory has been that one member of the team prepared for that pitch meeting by doing some Doritos research on youtube beforehand.  While there, they saw my storyboard, realized the idea would work great in one of Mosaic’s churches (I think they have 7 total) and probably figured that the concept was fair game and took it.  Now that I know when that pitch meeting took place, I suspect that my theory accurately describes how things happened.  And since it seems that as many as 5 people contributed to the story of “Casket,” that explains the differences between my works and the final version of the other team’s entry.

The goal of Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest was for the winners to score a spot in the “Top 3” on the USA Today ad meter.  If one of the Doritos finalists were to be ranked the best spot of the game, the creators would get a million bucks.  Second best would get the filmmakers $600K and 3rd would get them $400K.  The ad meter results are in and one Doritos ad actually scored the #2 spot.  But “Casket” wound up being ranked #14.  (click here for the full ad meter results)

I mention this because I want everyone reading this to understand that there is no big jackpot that I am trying to grab a piece of here.  All the makers of “Casket” got was $25,000 and I’m sure that money is already divided up and gone.  So my concerns aren’t part of some crass sue-a-church-and-get-rich-quick scheme.  For me, this is about principle and as I’ve told the lawyers at Doritos many times, my number one goal is simply to find out the truth about what the heck happened here.

Now that the contest is all over, I really don’t know what I should do next.  Should I get a lawyer?  Should I seal myself up in a casket full of Doritos and pretend this never happened?  What the heck is the little guy supposed to do in this country when he suspects that some giant megachurch with deep pockets and lawyers on retainer infringed on his copyrights?

Right now, the only thing I know for sure is that next year, I’m entering Careerbuilder’s Super Bowl commercial contest.

BTW:  I normally post under the pseudonym “Beardy” but here’s info about the real me.  Ironically, I do not actually have a beard.  If anyone (even a member of the “Casket” team) wants to contact me I can be reached at .

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Crash the Super Bowl winners + Ad Meter results!

Posted by Beardy on February 7th, 2010

Super Bowl XLIV just ended and that means that the 2010 installment of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest is finally over too. All three winning commercials aired in the first quarter but SURPRISE!…Doritos snuck one more Crash the Superbowl finalist in during the 4th quarter. And holy crap, the USA Today Ad Meter results have just come in and SURPRISE again! One of the Crash the Superbowl ads cracked the top 3! I’ll post all the numbers below but first here are the official winners in the order they ran. From what I’ve read, the order that the commercials aired reflect which entries got the most, second most and third most votes last month.

1. Underdog. Created by Nick Dimondi/Joshua Svoboda

2. House Rules. Created by Joelle de Jesus

3. Casket. Created by Kevin T. Willson

SURPRISE BONUS AD. Snack Attack Samurai. Created by Ben Krueger

A few days ago I explained here and here that it looked like Doritos had already revealed the names of the Crash the Super Bowl entries that were going to air tonight. The finalist entries that were publicly identified as destined for air last week were Snack Attack Samurai, Kids These Days and Casket. Looks like those predictions were off by one. But hey, way back in December, before the finalists were even announced, we predicted in this post that “Underdog” would go all the way this year. So hurray for us!

UPDATE: Oh snap!!!! The Ad Meter results are in and UNDERDOG was rated the second best commercial of the entire game right after the Betty White/Snickers spot! That means the makers of Underdog, 5 Points Productions will be receiving a $600,000 bonus from Doritos. As for the other three Crash the Super Bowl entries that aired tonight….well, they didn’t fare so well. None of them even cracked the top 10. Here are the numbers.

1. Underdog. Ad Meter Score: 8.27. Ad Meter Rank: #2

2. House Rules. Ad Meter Score: 7.12. Ad Meter Rank: #11

3. Casket. Ad Meter Score: 7.00. Ad Meter Rank: #14

4. Snack Attack Samurai. Ad Meter Score: 6.79. Rank: #17

Now even though none of the other ads made the top 3, the scores are still quite impressive. After all, there were 60 commercials ranked by the ad meter. Plus since Snack Attack Samurai aired so late in the game I bet its score suffered because the focus groups in the Ad Meter polling were probably a little burnt out by then. You can see the full list of ad meter results here: USA Today Ad Meter.

So what did we learn tonight? Well, we learned that Beardy is a genius! We totally called this one. Over the last few weeks we’ve repeatedly claimed that “Underdog” was going to make it to the top three and not only that, we predicted that it was the only one of the six finalists that had a chance of doing so.

Seriously though, now that the dust is settling it’s clear that the big winner of the 2010 installment of the CTSB contest is 5 Points Productions. Though the Crash the Super Bowl contest has only been run three times, that plucky team of filmmakers from North Carolina have now won the competition TWICE! The 5 Points entry “” won the first installment of the CTSB contest and aired during the 2007 Super Bowl. Now their entry “Underdog” has also came out on top. Plus they were the first filmmakers ever to get TWO entries in the finals in one year!!  (The other was Kids These Days)  That’s three unbelievable achievements so it looks like Doritos should get ready to crown them as the new, “Kings of the Crash.”  They’ve earned it.

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Crash the Superbowl: Ad Meter Predictions

Posted by Beardy on January 17th, 2010

A few posts back I said I’d be reviewing all 6 of Doritos’s Crash the Superbowl finalists.  Well, after discovering a free graph making program on-line where you can make the points look like little Doritos, I’ve decided to do something way geekier.  Instead of doing straight reviews, I’m going to throw some hardcore graph action in your face and try to predict how each commercial might score on the real USA Today Ad Meter.

These graphs won’t show my personal opinions.  Rather, they will show what I expect the average opinions of everyone in the USA Today focus group might be.  If you missed our explanation the other day about how the USA Today Superbowl ad meter works, check it out here. Remember, USA Today’s focus groups include people from all walks of life.  So no matter how much 90% of the group likes a certain ad, there will always be at least a few people who dislike it.

Predicting how a commercial will score on the Ad Meter isn’t actually that tough.  The moments that people will score highly are easy to identify.  So even if the scores on these graphs don’t match what the real scores would look like, the peaks and valleys will appear in the same places.  So here we go.  I’ll put the ads in order of best scoring to worst:


1.  UNDERDOG.  PREDICTED SCORE:  8.19

SUMMARY:  The guys who made this spot knew what they were doing.  It’s essentially designed to score well in the Ad Meter.  EVERYONE loves dogs and EVERYONE hates jerks that are mean to dogs.  And history is on the side of this video.  Remember that Budweiser commercial where the dog trains the Clydesdale, Rocky-style?  That scored 1st on the ad meter in 2008.  Like I said, everyone loves dogs.  Plus, the cuteness and comedy in this ad start early which means which means viewers will “like it” for longer. Based on last year’s ad meter results, a score of 8.19 would get Underdog into the Top 3.


2. SNACK ATTACK SAMURAI.  PREDICTED SCORE: 7.46

SUMMARY:  This spot isn’t the most original submission I’ve seen but I bet it will make a lot of people smile.  It’s got kind a kooky vibe that I think viewers will find appealing, even if they don’t know why.  It LOOKS funny and FEELS funny, so even if it’s not actually super hilarious, I think it will score decently.


3. KIDS THESE DAYS.  PREDICTED SCORE: 7.15

SUMMARY:  Since a commercial’s final ad meter score is an average of how every second of the ad scored, Kids These Days probably won’t fair too well since it takes a while for the comedy to start.  But the main gag is a strong, likable one.  After Mr. Popped Collar gets shocked, I’m guessing viewers will keep their dials turned up as a retro-active sign of appreciation.


4.  THE SMACKOUT.  PREDICTED SCORE: 7.02

SUMMARY:  This spot was perfectly cast.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t perfectly shot.  The color is just plain messed up.  I like this story and think it was very well acted but it looks bad at times and I think that will be a turn off to viewers.  The use of cleavage was also a little gratuitous and I suspect a lot of women will punish this ad by keeping the score a little lower than is reasonable.  The slapstick is funny but not really Superbowl funny and I don’t think many viewers will be extremely impressed.


5. CASKET. PREDICTED SCORE: 6.85

SUMMARY: This is the best looking of all the CTSB finalists but all the other commercials airing during the superbowl will look as good as “Casket” or better. So production values won’t get them much ad meter juice. (Though I think the pretty church setting might result in an initial spike) This video has two things going against it; One, the protagonist’s plan is cruel and feels like a weak excuse for the guy to be in the casket and two, I think the “dead” man was miscast. Much of this commercial’s comedy comes from looks on the “dead” man’s face. I think the actor that was cast is simply annoying looking and I bet a lot of viewers would agree with me.


6. HOUSE RULES.  PREDICTED SCORE: 6.29

graph(5)

SUMMARY:  My gut reaction to this spot is that I like it.  But unfortunately, because of the way it’s set up, it’s doomed to perform poorly on the ad meter.  The graph tells the whole story.  A whopping 22 seconds go by before the real comedy starts.  That’s an eternity for a Superbowl commercial.  I think that not only will viewers not start scoring the commercial positively until the action starts, I think some may even start scoring it negatively if they start getting bored.

When you look at each ad charted out like this, you kind of have to wonder why Doritos picked some of these ads for the finals. I mean, I was able to whip up these graphs in like an hour. Millions and millions of dollars are at stake in the Crash the Superbowl contest so it seems hard to believe that Doritos wouldn’t have somebody analyze each finalist’s chances in the Ad meter.  Last year, a commercial needed to score at least a 7.49 just to make the top 10. So if Doritos did graph these out, then they already know that several of these videos just have zero chance of scoring “in the money.”  Hmmm, could it be that’s what they’re counting on?

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VCN’s Crash the Superbowl recommendations!

Posted by Beardy on December 16th, 2009

Note: Scroll down if you want to just skip my blabbering and see which 6 entries we recommend Doritos consider for the finals.

Since the passing of the November 9th deadline I’ve tried to watch as many of the entries for this year’s Crash the Superbowl contest as I could. But alas, Beardy is only human and I probably managed to look at only 2,800 or so of the 4,069 submitted videos. That means chances are good that I completely missed some of the most awesome submissions. So, though I’ve said that I planned to announce this website’s predictions for which entries will make it to the final 6, I don’t think that’s really a fair thing to do.

Instead, I’m going to completely ignore some of the highest quality spots that I saw and post 6 entries that I really enjoyed but that I suspect Doritos may overlook. So let’s call this list VideoContestNews.com’s official recommended CTSB entries! Before I get into my humble video recommendations, I’d like to first make one general recommendation to the judges of the Crash the Superbowl contest: Think Small.

While watching all those entries, I saw a lot of very, very well made and expensive spots but with two or three exceptions, none of the high-budget/high concept submissions had much heart. On the other hand, I did see a number of really cool, really creative commercials that seem to have been shot by semi-pros and amateurs using consumer and “prosumer” grade video cameras. But a little googling will tell you that 4 of the 5 finalists last year shot their entries with RED One cameras. Don’t know what that is? It’s a very, very high-end camera that starts at about $17,000. So it’s clear that last year Doritos wanted the slickest commercials that filmmakers outside of the ad industry could make. (If you can get your hands on anything nicer that a RED camera you’re probably already a well paid pro.)

And all of last year’s finalists were stellar. They were slick enough to look like actual TV commercials but they were also funny, subversive and surprising. But after watching almost 3,000 of this year’s entries I just don’t see many that had top notch production values and were also FUNNY and ORIGINAL. Basically this year’s slickest entries just come off as hollow versions of “real” commercials.

So what happened? Two things I think; One, Doritos put up millions of dollars in prize money and then marketed the contest like crazy. So tons of people who never picked up a camera before jumped on the bandwagon. And two, all of last year’s finalists were so F***ing amazing that many pro and semi-pro filmmakers assumed the bar would be way to high and didn’t bother to enter. People like that know the look of the RED camera and they did the math in their head and realized that to be a serious competitor, you’d need to have access to a RED camera (or at least a high end HD camera). So right off the bat you’re already looking at a budget of $1,000 to rent a RED camera for a day. And not just any shmuck can run those. So unless you’ve used one before, throw in another $500 for a D.P. who knows what he’s doing. So that’s $1,500 minimum. And I’ll tell you, it takes a very, very special person to be willing to gamble that much money on a production when they see that 3,000 entries have already been uploaded.

So basically this means that there are two kinds of good videos among this year’s batch of entries. There are cool, funny, inventive videos that were made by non-pros or semi-pros who used consumer and prosumer level gear, and there are ok, but not super funny, big-budget entries that feature pretty graphics, lots of fancy but unnecessary dolly shots and in some cases, established characters actors, B-list celebrities and in one case, a semi-well known indie band.

My recommendation to the CTSB judges is to forget the slick, not-so-funny entries and give a few of the littler guys a shot. The first year that Doritos ran the Crash the Superbowl competition (2006), the winning commercial had a budget of only $12! That’s probably why so many pros jumped in in 2008. (Doritos did something else for the superbowl the year in between) They knew that if they could make a funny spot that also looked like a “real” commercial, they could crush the competition. Well this year I don’t think the pros delivered and so Doritos should do something bold; forget about only picking finalists that look like “real” commercials. Obviously they can’t air a spot with crappy lighting and muffled sound during the superbowl, but they can and should give serious consideration to the “prosumer” level filmmakers that submitted. If they don’t, I don’t think CTSB spots will go on to take all three top spots in the USA Today ad meter.

And making the “Top 3” of the Ad meter is the entire point of this contest. That right there is exactly why Doritos should go with videos that are attention-getting and big on laughs, rather than videos that are super-slick but only mildly amusing. And while the point of the contest is to make the top 3, the MESSAGE of the contest is that if given the chance, creative, regular Joes can beat the Madison Avenue crowd at their own game. Even many of the people in the Ad Meter poll will understand that’s what this contest is about and I suspect they will give extra points to the CTSB finalists IF those finalist videos actually look different that all the other spots that air during the game.

What I’m saying is that Doritos should pick at least a few finalists that are a little ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES. Yes, they might be seen by 100 Million people and yes they will stick out like a sore thumb. And that’s why it’d be great! If you’re watching the game and all of the sudden, some crazy thing that some dude shot in his back yard comes on the TV, you’re going to sit up and take notice. And if that “imperfect” ad makes you laugh, then it has been a success, even if only cost 12 bucks to make. If Doritos wanted to shoot a commercial featuring Flavor Flav they could seal that deal during a single lunch meeting. If they wanted to cast the secretary from Ferris Bueller in a commercial they could make that happen in less than 4 phone calls. And if they wanted their own version of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials they could have a team crank that out in a week. So why should Doritos pick spots that an ad firm on Madison Avenue could slap together without breaking a sweat? If you’re going to create a new and completely different way to get your superbowl commercials, shouldn’t the commercials you get actually seem completely different than everything else that’s going to air during the game?

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Finally, here are the 6 entries that I really hope Doritos considers for their 2010 Crash the Superbowl finalists. These are in order with #1 being my favorite:

#6. Don’t Be that Guy by “Moedirty.” Video #2530
This spot really only has one thing going for it; the super-serious guy at the end. But you know what? That guy is PERFECT. If this aired during the Superbowl the next day people in offices all across the country would be saying the hot new catchphrase “You have to leave.”





#5. Want More? by “Shonky.” Video #2081
If this commercial was shot by a major ad company you wouldn’t think about it twice. But knowing that it was just a couple of crazy dudes who made this adds a sweet level of insanity to it.





#4. So Worth It by “tgo0116.” Video #307
This is a Superbowl-style comedy of errors commercial shot for (probably) nothing. But that low-budget, indie look gives it the heart that so many of the slicker entries are lacking. This guy wanted to win so bad he cut a hole in his mother f***ing roof. Hell yeah.





#3. Doritos Make Everything Better by “Keithhopkin.” Video #951
It looks like it was shot for a high school film class but this will keep viewers smiling all the way through. The shot of the dog wincing when the Doritos fall on him might hurt this video’s chances but the dog probably didn’t mind, right?





#2. Battlestations! by “Laserbunny.” Video #4097
This one has actually got some nice effects but it still has a nice indie vibe to it. Despite the CGI they use, the “fractal Dorito” was apparently real. I think this one can make the official Top 6.





#1. Wrong Commercial by “knewacheck.” Video #3742
This commercial is just flat out stupid…and I love it. It’s so weird and goofy and you can tell that it was made for fun. Maybe the “Got Milk” bit at the end will cause a copyright problem big enough to keep it out of the finals but I hope not. The spot’s absurd but it’s absurd in a very smart way. Right off the bat, the characters let the viewer know that what they are seeing is a commercial submitted for a contest. That gives the spot license to be imperfect and look like it was made by three random knuckleheads. But I’m over thinking it. It’s funny and it works, that’s all that should matter.





Now as I said, I also shot an entry for this year’s competition but of course it’d be pretty shady of me to include it in my top 6. So instead I’ll just place a link right here if you want to check it out:

/#/video/1983

Despite all my talk about low-budget spots, I shot my entry on HD and it cost about $1,600. We even through a crane shot in there! Do as Beardy says folks, not as Beardy does. We used a prosumer HD camera though so I consider it to be a “medium-sized” production. Plus it is sorta rough around the edges I think.

So what do you think folks? Are we right or are we crazy? Did we overlook any potential winners? Let us know in the comment box. And because I can’t help myself, check back on Friday to see which two, more slickly-produced videos we predict will make it to the finals and the Superbowl.

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