PaintCare has awarded $10,000 to NANOShorts Entertainment as the winner of an online video contest meant to raise awareness about paint recycling in California. NANOShorts submitted “Spring Cleaning,” a comical video short that features an unsuspecting young man, named Rick, walking his garbage to the curb, which sets off a chain of “telephone-style” miscommunication among his neighbors.
As Rick nears the curb, his neighbor, Ned, notices what Rick is doing and asks if he is doing a little ‘Spring cleaning.’ Rick, referencing the box of old household paint cans atop the garbage can, replies that he is “throwing out some old paints.” Ned mishears paints for pants and yells to another neighbor standing by that Rick “has blown out his pants.”
Once the confusion and miscommunication are clarified that Rick didn’t blow out his pants, but that he is throwing out paint, the whole neighborhood starts yelling at Rick that he should recycle.
“We had three very different videos competing in this contest, and all of the YouTube teams did an impressive job featuring the PaintCare message through their own unique brand,” said Paul Fresina, Director of Communications at PaintCare.“ We are thrilled to award the grand prize to the team that clearly hit a home run with our target audiences.”
The humorous and farcical approach to the topic of paint recycling resonated well with audiences, giving NANOShorts a strong advantage for first place with over 4,000 votes. The runners up, SlapTv and Recycled Babies got 1,359 and 1,330 votes respectively.
PaintCare set the competition up on Facebook, asking voters to chose from three contracted video blog groups, SlapTV, NANOShorts Entertainment and Recycled Babies. The Competition ran for 2 weeks, and started on February 16, 2015.
While not the size of the Doritos video competition, it’s worth noting that non-for-profit organizations can use the same marketing techniques as their commercial counterparts, regardless of size. And while Doritos started their Crash the Super Bowl contest nine years ago to launch the careers of aspiring filmmakers, they seem to have turned their back on their original premise this year, having awarded the million-dollar prize to a professional well established in television media.
Let’s hope that YouTube and other non-broadcast media creators will keep working on developing their craft and audiences, and marketers will keep looking for this new talent to emerge from non-traditional media.
