eBid online adverts competition?

[ToyCrazyUK]

Just settling down for my Sunday nap and I suddenly had a idea.......

how about running an eBid online advert competition? I have various ideas running around in my head and I'll try and explain them.

Get people to make their own videos advertising eBid - the more bizarre the better! They can post them on YouTube. If we get some good ones, we could get them picked up on the viral charts and on the newspaper websites.

We could set up a temporary website with a gallery of all the clips so people can vote on their favourite.

What does everyone else think? Anyone know anything about setting up a website which allows movie uploading and voting and whether it is easy and cheap to do? Anyone know the regulations you need to stick to with running competitions?

[nykmedia]

Competitions can be run by almost anyone, but you can only charge entry fees where there is an element of skill involved. If it's a free to enter competition then I think you need to state full rules of entry, timescale, what it is promoting, who the promoter is and what, if any, prizes will be awarded.
There's also the issue of copyright and trademark protection, performing rights if you use anyone else's material (music etc) and keeping all entries within the laws of commercial advertising & decency - especially as the entries would be available in the public domain with eBid's name attached to them. You would need some way of policing entries to ensure that the system of uploading material on behalf of a known company fits in with that company's overall image. This idea, I would think, would need to be taken up with eBid themselves, as it is a mine of potential mishaps. What you are suggesting, although an excellent idea, is a near impossible situation to control, as it is wide open to abuse by anyone with a mind to do so. However, if the eBid management agreed to accept the video entries themselves and then upload those they saw as suitable, that would be a different matter. I think it could be a fun way of producing a small commercial advert but am not sure of the rules governing this sort of commercial advertising material on YouTube.
Just trying to be helpful, so I hope you don't read this as being down on your great idea

[ToyCrazyUK]

Hi
Thanks for the info. I had a feeling that it might not be as simple as I had hoped. Hopefully eBid might do some promotions in the future as it might be a fun thing to do. I might get my sons to do an unofficial advert, they're into making movies at the moment with their Doctor Who characters!