Just woke up to a painful reality, in which I won’t be going to Hawaii on an all-expense paid trip for my Krazy Glue video. I was awarded only 1st prize, a $250 apple gift certificate, and not the grand prize trip to Hawaii.
I am racking my brains trying to figure out how it happened, and at the moment, I cannot. With 5 times the amount of views of any other entry (including the winning one), I am left stunned.
I try to take a lesson out of every contest to go forward and improve myself and my game, but on this one, I’m just not sure. I bothered people non-stop, I posted everywhere, I made a video that I was utterly happy with and that I think, on comedy and watchability, stood head and shoulders above the rest, I produced the enormous view count – the only thing I can imagine is that the view count advantage led my supporters to stop their daily voting because they thought it was wrapped up. That, or someone at the Krazy Glue company just decided they didn’t want mine to be the winner in spite of the public vote.
The good news is I can use that $250 Apple Card for entirely work related stuff to try to improve my equipment. Anyway, I’m starting today sad but will try to whip out another contest entry in time to make sure this downer blog post isn’t my only one of the day.
i thought you were a sure thing. i had an entry as well – cleaning out the garage – and even my views were more than the winning one. not sure how it was calculated. i enjoy your work. i’ve entered the junglesmash one too, but the site hasn’t been updated in over a month. good luck, joel. i’ll see you out there. have u entered ‘bean chant’? paul
Yeah, I smell a rat! It always seemed weird to me that KrazyGlue chose to show the views but not the votes — especially in a contest that was supposed to be decided by public vote. And then, they end up choosing a video that mathematically has a lower chance of winning (based on views) than 4 other entries, but just happens to be uncannily on-message for their brand.
I don’t think they ever intended to abide by the public vote if they didn’t agree with it. And that’s why the designed the site to not show the vote count (trust me, it’s not very hard to do if they wanted to). They purposely made their rules this way (totally decided by user voting, you can vote once a day) to boost site traffic, and then apparently threw them out the window at judging time. If you weren’t such a nice guy, I’d demand to see the actual vote count with a lawyer standing behind you threateningly (as threateningly as a lawyer can stand, anyway). But, that might do more harm than good if you established a rep as a contest contester.
I think the lesson you should take away from this is that the businesses holding these contests aren’t above breaking their own rules (see Honda of Bowie). I’m not sure what you can really do to protect yourself against that — other than maybe create a contest monitoring watchdog agency, or that stupid union you were talking about…