It’s SuperBowl season again. I don’t follow football (I’m a Redskins fan, so there’s no point), but I can always tell when the SuperBowl is coming up because all of my Facebook friends stop inviting me to watch their improv shows and instead invite me to watch their Doritos Crash the SuperBowl Contest entries.

For the uninitiated – first, consider yourself lucky – then, let me explain: A few years ago, the people at Frito-Lay hatched a marketing plan so devious, so perfectly-formed in its evil that I can’t help but admire and despise it at the same time. It’s the Hans Gruber of advertising campaigns.

Here’s how it works: Frito-Lay set up a contest based around a website where contestants can upload homemade Doritos commercials for the world to watch. Anyone can then watch and vote for their “favorite” (i.e. their own or their friends’). Then, supposedly based on the number of views and votes, a handful of these spec commercials are selected to air during the SuperBowl. From these finalists, a winner is chosen and awarded a big prize (historically: a trip to the game, a million dollars, and a contract to make another Doritos commercial).

It’s the kind of campaign that can make an ad exec’s entire career. And it’s all pure, unadulterated marketing evil.

The Doritos Crash the SuperBowl Contest is the greatest example of a spec creative work farm disguised as a contest. By offering both paltry and illusory rewards, Doritos Crash The SuperBowl Contest preys upon amateur filmmakers and actors – convincing them to willfully hand over their time and talent for the chief benefit of the Frito-Lay corporation.

To prove my point, let’s peel back the layers:

Layer 1: Passing the Costs on to the Customer

SuperBowl ads cost a lot of money. According to USA Today, the average 30-second SuperBowl spot this year costs $3.5 million – and that’s just for the airtime. The production costs of the average SuperBowl ad (after ad company fees, directors, talent, music rights, effects, focus groups and testing, etc.) can easily double or triple that airtime amount. Frito-Lay could go this traditional route and spend that huge sum of money in an attempt to produce a memorable SuperBowl commercial, but why do that when they can just sponsor a contest and get their customers to spend that money for them?

Now, I’m sure running the CTS website costs a pretty penny, and the finalists and winners are compensated handsomely. But I’m sure the costs of running the contest and paying off the finalists is far cheaper for Frito-Lay than going the traditional SuperBowl ad production route. I personally know contestants who have sunk thousands of dollars of their own money into their non-winning CTS entries. They’d be better off just writing Frito-Lay a check for their production expenses.

So by sponsoring a contest, Frito-Lay literally passes off millions in production costs to their customers while leveraging the internet as one giant, free focus group. Clever, but not necessarily evil. Let’s go deeper:

Layer 2 : Handing Over Rights to Your Work

If you read the fine-print of the CTS submission rules, you’ll notice that by uploading a commercial to the site, contestants give Frito-Lay and friends the “unconditional and perpetual right to post, display, publish, use, adapt, edit and/or modify such Submission in any way, in any and all media, for any purpose, without limitation, and without consideration to you.” That means that even if a commercial doesn’t win, Frito-Lay can use it whenever they want, however they want, and – most importantly – without paying the creators anything.

To be fair, so far the Frito-Lay people have done the right thing – if only with contest finalists. I spoke with Jeff Lorch – lead actor in the 2011 CTS winner “Pug Attack”. When his spot won and continued to run on TV in the following weeks, Jeff was paid the residuals he was entitled to as a member of SAG.

But what about the hundreds of other non-finalist actors and filmmakers? By entering the contest, these creators have given Frito-Lay the full legal right to run their ads in their original form (on TV and online), remake them entirely, or even sell their ideas to a competitor – all without paying them a dime. So by sponsoring a contest, Frito-Lay gets a literal treasure trove of intellectual property and commercial ideas to exploit however they choose.

One might argue that this surrender of rights is clearly laid out in the CTS contest rules and that all contestants presumably know what they’re getting into before submitting. Hooray for transparency, I guess. All I know is if I saw my entry on TV after the SuperBowl (or an idea even remotely similar), I’d be really pissed off.

Layer 3 : Turning Customers Into Spammers

But the true evil genius of Doritos’ Crash the SuperBowl Contest is that it turns its contestants into spammers. Convinced that views and votes will push their entries to the SuperBowl, CTS contestants blast their friends and family with emails, Facebook messages, and Twitter posts repeatedly begging them to watch and vote for their entries. Finalists have even created entire independent websites and self-funded online marketing campaigns to promote their entries – effectively creating an additional layer of Doritos marketing at no cost to Frito-Lay.

For Frito-Lay, this is a major marketing coup. In this age of advertising clutter, all marketers are increasingly turning to social media in an attempt “to turn their customers into brand evangelists.” By tying their marketing message into to this contest, Frito-Lay gets a ongoing marketing campaign that literally advertises itself – but does so by piggybacking on the goodwill of their customers among their friends and families. These good-natured voters have to register with their email address to vote on the CTS website – presumably to avoid duplicate votes – but we all know Frito-Lay is just harvesting their email addresses for marketing research and mailing lists.

To them, that’s genius. To me, that’s evil.

A Growing Trend

Sadly, the contest-as-marketing-campaign idea is spreading like a cancer. One of Chevy’s SuperBowl ads this year will be a “crowdsourced” video selected by how many times contestants “share” (read: spam) their friends with it. Sheets Energy Strips recently enlisted Lebron James to judge “user-submitted videos” (read: spec ads) for potential TV airtime. And in perhaps the most ironic example, the Obama re-election campaign recently set up a contest for graphic designers to submit spec (read: unpaid) poster designs – get this – for their jobs program.

Every year, companies use contests like these and Crash the SuperBowl to lure filmmakers, actors, designers, and other creatives into doing their marketing work for them with the promise of money and exposure. But the money is a long-shot and the exposure is a illusion.

“But the Crash The SuperBowl contest rewards the winner with a million dollars!” you say. True, but so does a lottery ticket. And at least lottery money goes back to the state to fund schools and other public programs.

“But the Crash the SuperBowl contest offers the winner a chance to make another commercial!” you say. True, and that’s great – if you want to make Doritos commercials for a living (I hazard to guess most contestants don’t).

“But the Crash The SuperBowl contest offers the exposure of a SuperBowl-sized audience!” you say. True, but is that type of exposure really all that life-changing?

I contacted Nick Armstrong, an actor in the 2011 CTS finalist “Casket”, and asked him how being seen by 111 million people during last year’s SuperBowl has affected his acting career in the year since.

“Everyone during the time was like ‘Your life is going to change’,” Nick writes. “I was like ‘Uh, no it’s not!’ I think a lot of people put that on it. After the commercial aired, I still had to get back out there and audition like the rest and continue my hustle. I did do a lot of press interviews and things and they thought I was a movie star…I just kept laughing telling them…If you only knew what it is really like to be an actor these days!”

So when a comparison of the rewards that CTS winners receive versus the rewards that Frito-Lay reaps reveals a heavily lop-sided scale in Frito-Lay’s favor, what’s the point of entering again?

A Personal Dilemma

One of this year’s CTS finalists is called Man’s Best Friend and stars Derek Leonidoff. I know Derek: he and I performed for years in the LA improv/sketch group Cup of Tea. He’s a terrifically talented guy and I’ll be quietly rooting for his spot to win on SuperBowl Sunday.

When Man’s Best Friend was selected as a finalist, Derek contacted me for online marketing advice. I eventually declined because a) he and his team were already doing everything possible (a dedicated website, daily Facebook and email reminders, etc.) and b) I just couldn’t reconcile advising him on a situation I take issue with. I’ll bend over backwards to help Derek succeed with any of his other creative endeavors. I want him reach SuperBowl-sized audiences – but I’d rather it was with work that he owns and that primarily benefits him, not Frito-Lay.

My Point

I’m not calling for a boycott of the Doritos Crash the SuperBowl contest, nor am I accusing entrants of “selling out.” Instead, I hope to encourage potential contestants to use the same time, money, and talent they would invest in CTS entries to create original works that similarly showcase their creativity, remain their own, and won’t clog their friends’ newsfeeds with spammy requests to interact with a brand of crappy corn chips.

In reflecting on his Crash the SuperBowl experience, Jeff Lorch gets it:

“What it did do for me was open up my mind to the possibilities we have to make our own material, and to make it well. I was already on the train of making short films and such, and my friend’s winning … reinforced the ‘never say die’ attitude.”

So next year, when Crash The SuperBowl season comes around again (and it will), I hope all my fellow actors and filmmakers see it for the thinly-veiled, lop-sided, evil marketing campaign it is – and then take their talents elsewhere.

Or we could just make parody ads like the fellas at Three Cats Dads:

What do you think? Is the Doritos Crash the SuperBowl Contest evil? Crash the comments below with your opinion.