We’ve watched all the videos submitted to the Poptent Promo assignment a hundred times, at least. Heck, it’s our own assignment, right? After much internal debate over coffee, heated deliberations over pizza and hours of rooting for our faves in front of the little screen - here are our choices for awards.
The First Place Award and the $1000 go to:
The two Runner Up Awards of $500 go to:
We also wanted to recognize exemplory work from the following creators. These all recieve our congratulations and an ‘honorable mention’.
Thanks for all the efforts in working on these videos! We appreciate your creativity and effort. We’ll be doing more of these assignments soon, so stay tuned for your chance if you didn’t get into this one.
April 1st, 2009 at 3:32 am
What would really help us out and make these award announcements more interesting is if you guys put the reasons as to why you chose the First Place winner over the Runner Ups. For example, it seems to me it was probably a toss up between “For the people, by the people” and “See for yourself,” and I want to know why you guys chose “For the people…” over that one.I also wonder, WONDER, why in the world “Get a new angle” got first place over Zack Scott’s commercial or even Production6’s commercial. They were both better than “Get a New Angle”! Yea, I said it - but it’s just my opinion…Anyway, I just think it would really prove beneficial to poptent creators if we can peek into the mind of judges and judging. Because in the online video contest landscape, we never hear any feedback as to why certain videos were chosen over others. We creators are always left to gasp and wonder “What in the heck were they thinking?” when they choose the winners. I know there might be some technical or legality issues as to why you guys can’t give out the reasons why you picked the winners, but a man can only hope - hope that Poptent is different…
April 1st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
You brought up some great points here, Gio. I’d like to answer this with our singularly most important guideline for selecting the videos we pick. Brand messaging. Doesn’t matter how cool or flashy a video is, if it doesn’t have the precise, exact, nail-on-the-head right message for the audience we’re trying to reach, we won’t choose it.
After running assignments on Poptent and XLNTads for over a year and half I can say that the most disappointing thing about a great number of the excellent, well-made videos that come in are that they are just slightly off-brief. It’s so disheartening for us to watch such awesome creative to know it won’t be chosen because it just isn’t telling the story that needs to be told.
The Poptent assignment was extra difficult for us to choose award winners because it was ours and we had a highly vested interest in getting our own message perfect. We were looking for something very specific and we felt the pain our clients have felt in choosing which video put the message just right when videos were so close, yet ever-so-slightly off point.
If I were going to make any videos for an assignment here or on someone else’s contest, I would spend the longest amount of time coming up with the script and the message. We say it over and over again – read the creative brief with a fine-tooth comb. Then read it again. Then have your actors read it. Then your editor. Long before you shoot. Long before you edit. The concept and the script have to be dead-on.
All that being said, there were so many great videos in this assignment. We wish we had the funds to award them all. We will probably be working with several of you in the near future to refine some of your videos and perhaps even commissioning more. We need these videos. And we need them to be perfect. The better they are, the more work for all of us!
If any of you would like direct feedback on individual videos - we’re always happy to give it. Just send me a direct message on Poptent and I’d be glad to give you some input.