Adidas are giving you the chance to shoot with David Beckham in their photography competition. The lucky winner will get to meet the footballing star, take a few photos and work with him the studio. There’s also £500 of adidas gear on offer for the winner whilst 10 runners up also get some adidas kit. To enter you need to submit a photo that shows them “something with heart, something with passion” – and you need to do that before the 20th May. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that in their infinite wisdom, adidas have decided that Take The Stage With Beckham should be a voting competition. The top 10 as voted by the public go through to the final. This means that someone with a decent photo may well not get a look in at the expense of someone who can work the voting system. We don’t just mean buying votes or using vote exchanges but also using social leverage.
It’s interesting that voting competitions are now well and truly in the “bad boy” category because of cheating, but no one seemed too fussed about them when we mentioned social media unfairness a year or so back. Oh well! Anyway, back to adidas and their Beckham competition. The set up of the competition isn’t that great! The gallery for the entries is 960+ pages long with 4 entries per page. It’s impossible to gauge who’s ahead and just how many votes you’d actually need to get into the top 10 (maybe that’s not a bad thing).
According to the blog people can’t find their photo, can’t upload it, aren’t being notified of when their entry has been accepted and can’t link to it to get votes! We also couldn’t locate any terms and conditions so have no idea how adidas intend to judge the finalists and announce the winner.
Considering the prize on offer it’s a pretty poor state of affairs. A lot of photographic types would love this prize – myself included. Imagine being able to say that you spent last week photographing David Beckham (me, I’m only at the Nick Clegg level).
However, because the competition page is a bit of a mish mash the whole thing comes across as a bit half baked. Where are the terms? Why can’t we see the leaders? Why is it so hard just to look through the gallery and cast votes for quality entries? Perhaps if adidas had put a little more effort in their competition set up, decided to judge all entries and not blown all their budget on the video above then this could have been a pretty cool competition with a once in a lifetime prize.
If you fancy having a go then make sure you visit the Take The Stage With Beckham competition page before May 20th… and good luck.
