30,000 Free Super Bowl Ads: What Doritos Teaches Photographers About Spec Work

Doritos collected more than 30,000 fan-made Super Bowl commercials between 2006 and 2016, and the overwhelming majority of the people who made them were paid nothing. That is the arithmetic of spec work, compressed into one contest, and it maps directly onto every client who has asked you for a free test shoot, a sample edit or a "quick concept" before committing.

Josh Olufemii traces the history of the Crash the Super Bowl contest in a recent video essay, and the numbers deserve scrutiny. The marketing executive who launched it had a small fraction of the budget Anheuser-Busch spent producing 20 or 30 Super Bowl ads and testing which one would win. So she outsourced the testing to consumers. By her own estimate, roughly 98% of submissions couldn't air. The remaining one or two percent were, in her words, "pretty darn good." That's a 50-to-1 rejection rate dressed up as opportunity.

What did winners actually get?

Starting in 2009, a fan ad that took first place on the USA Today Ad Meter earned its maker $1 million. Two brothers from a small Indiana town did it first, with a spot that cost them under $2,000 to produce. On paper, that's a 500-to-1 return. In practice, it was a lottery.

The contest did change some lives, and Olufemii gives that fair weight. One winner moved from micro-budget films and scattered freelance gigs to a Transformers movie, then landed a studio offer to direct a feature. Another, who finally won in 2012 with a baby-themed ad after losing in earlier years to dog spots, says he was "a millionaire for less than 24 hours." He had promised a cut of any prize to everyone who helped — crew, actors, friends refreshing voting pages — and went into debt almost immediately. Hearing him tally those promises is one of the sobering stretches of the piece.

The takeaway: even the winners can lose, if the deal structure is wrong.

How does this apply to photo contests?

Photo contests run the same economics, and the entry terms decide who comes out ahead. Some brand and publication contests include language granting the organizer a license to every submission, winners or not — often royalty-free, often with no end date. You shoot, they own usage, in perpetuity, for the price of a form.

Pro-Imaging, the photographers' rights group, pushed back years ago with a bill of rights for competitions, sorting contests by whether entrants keep their copyright. That resource still works as a filter: if a contest's terms transfer or license your images before you've won anything, you're supplying stock for free.

Brands have also felt pressure to pay. When Apple ran its Shot on iPhone Challenge in 2019, it said winning images would earn a licensing fee for billboard and ad placements — an admission that usable commercial photography has a price.

The same test applies to clients. If a prospect wants a sample shoot before booking you and plans to keep or publish the images, they're not testing you. They're commissioning you. Quote a scaled-down day rate or a usage fee instead of handing it over.

Is spec work ever worth it?

Around the time Doritos launched its contest, a group of designers ran a campaign against spec work — anything produced before a client agrees to pay. One critic in the video tallied more than four years of round-the-clock labor poured into a single design contest with a 1,500-euro prize. He calls it "crowd subjugation." Four years. For 1,500 euros.

Platform builders see it differently. One of them points to nearly $1.5 million a month paid out to creatives across 140 countries. Note what that number doesn't say: how it splits per creative, or what the median payout looks like. Monthly totals flatter volume, not individuals.

Ad agencies have fought the same battle for decades under a friendlier name: pitching. One strategist puts the odds of an outside agency winning a typical pitch at about 4% — 25-to-1 against, worse than the Doritos odds. Another commentator compares entering one to buying a lottery ticket. Agencies with revenue cushions can absorb that. Freelance photographers mostly can't.

Olufemii closes with the two questions he now asks before doing a free test edit — the kind of checklist worth writing down before the next "just show us what you'd do" email arrives.