What 30,000 Free Doritos Commercials Can Teach You About Spec Work

Doritos once got more than 30,000 Super Bowl commercials made by fans, and most of the people who made them got nothing. If a client has ever asked you for a free test edit, a sample shoot, or a quick concept before they commit, you've been offered a smaller version of the same deal.

From 2006 until its final run in 2016, the Crash the Super Bowl contest let anyone upload a 30-second Doritos spot and compete for airtime during the most expensive broadcast of the year. Josh Olufemii traces how it grew from a rescue plan for a brand in decline into a million-dollar lottery. The marketing executive who launched it had a small fraction of the budget Anheuser-Busch spent making 20 or 30 ads and testing which one would win, so she handed that testing job to consumers. By her own estimate, about 98% of the submissions couldn't air. The remaining one or two percent, in her words, were "pretty darn good." Starting in 2009, a fan ad that took first place on the USA Today Ad Meter earned its maker $1 million, and two brothers from a small Indiana town did it first with a spot that cost them under $2,000.

The contest did change some lives, and Olufemii gives those stories fair weight. One winner went from micro-budget films and scattered freelance gigs to working on a Transformers movie, then landed a studio offer to direct a feature. Another, who finally won in 2012 with an ad featuring a baby after losing in earlier years to spots with dogs in them, says he was "a millionaire for less than 24 hours." He had promised a share of any prize to everyone who pitched in, from crew and actors to the friends refreshing voting pages, and he went into debt almost immediately. Hearing him describe how those promises added up is one of the more sobering stretches of the video.

Photo contests run on the same economics, and the entry terms usually decide who comes out ahead. Some brand and publication contests include language granting the organizer a license to use every submission, winners or not, often royalty-free and without an end date. The photographers' group Pro-Imaging pushed back on those rights grabs with a bill of rights for competitions, sorting contests by whether entrants kept their copyright. Big brands have also felt pressure to pay for what they use: when Apple ran its Shot on iPhone Challenge in 2019, it said the winning images would earn a licensing fee for billboard and ad placements. The same test works on a client who wants a sample shoot before booking you. If they plan to keep or publish the images, you're doing the job, and you can quote a scaled-down day rate or a usage fee instead of handing it over.

Around the time Doritos launched its contest, a group of designers launched a campaign against spec work, which covers anything you produce before a client agrees to pay for it. One critic in the video tallies more than four years of round-the-clock labor poured into a single design contest with a prize of 1,500 euros, and he calls it "crowd subjugation." The people who build crowdsourcing platforms see it another way, and one of them points to nearly $1.5 million a month paid out to creatives in 140 countries. Ad agencies have been arguing over the same question for decades under a different name: pitching. One strategist puts the odds of an outside agency winning a typical pitch at about 4%, and another commentator compares entering one to buying a lottery ticket.

Olufemii lays out the two questions he now asks before doing a free test edit near the end of the video.