I’m glad I went to the Cookie Crumbles Contest for Leslie and Mari. I’m glad they were represented by a flesh and blood person so when the choice was made to go with the commercial package and throw art and creativity out the window, there was someone there to report back. But the people at the “FTC Ehavioral Town Hall” were pretty much 180 degrees removed from the arts and culture perspective. There were dozens of moments when it was clear that our entry had to lose, but the most telling came when one of the judges said that it was swell that consumers had provided videos. Well, this was actually an insult to all of the entrants’ professionalism, but none more than Leslie Winer. Leslie is an artist who entered the contest with an offering of her best effort to address the Stop Badware groups’ expressed needs with original and creative content. She is a content provider, a producer, but certainly not a consumer. The winner was a young man who provided a professionally packaged corporate presentation. He and Leslie were in different contests.

The five finalists are all right here. The winner was the one with no people in it, titled simply “Cookies.”

Leslie expresses her disappointment here. She says,

If you were looking for a corporate TV acceptable video for middleclass consumers interested in how to monetize and be monetized by the internets then why the hell did you host it on YouTube? Surely you have the space and money to host the videos on your own site. The video you chose to Win your Competition would rival any PowerPoint presentation at any pharmaceutical company’s lobbying conference. If that’s what you wanted WTF did you not say so upfront?

I see her point and I understand her disappointment and the world would be a lot worse off without her contribution than it would if any of the others evaporated somehow. But lots of people put their best efforts forward, and one can’t expect the suits to select for art. Clayton took home the cash for a professional corporate presentation. Maybe he can spin it into an ad agency gig. Maybe he already works for an agency, I don’t know. We were short on shared biographical detail at the Cookie Crumbles Contest.

I was proud to represent for art and technology, to represent a digital native (the on screen talent) who sees through the crap, who sees the trivial nature of the problem and the easy solution to it, who isn’t trying to fuel fires of concern, but rather just calls crap crap and rubbish rubbish.