I wish I could make these documents public so you could give me your two-cents worth too!
Oh boy, I feel like I’m in a tough spot. After reading all the comments on my website, through Twitter, Facebook, and the IslandReefJob Ning forum, I was going to provide all the information I received from Mason Horvath on my blog. That way, most of the questions would be answered and I could provide my two cents about it all at the same time.
I posted the e-mail invite I received from Dean Horvath on my site yesterday because it didn’t contain any information that would be harmful to his company or campaign. If anything, it only helped spread the word and increased the number of hits to his site. Though several media outlets in Vancouver received the news, the only one I’ve come across that bothered to write about it was The Vancouver Sun.
However, I don’t think I can post Dean Horvath’s reply to my request for more information without being charged with slander or at the very least scolded rather badly for it. It wasn’t a mean e-mail by any means — he was quite polite and sounds like a fun guy. But, there was a lot of fine print and legal jargon in the attachments that made it sound like I’d be put in jail if I made anything public. Plus, I don’t think people would be all that impressed with the grammatical errors either. I know I wasn’t. Oops. Was that too much information? Am I not allowed to say that either?
Sorry, I’ll usually let grammatical errors slide if they’re in an e-mail from a close friend or whatever, but when it’s an e-mail from the head of a million dollar company (according to BC Business Online, Mason Horvath generated $8 million in revenues last year), I expect there to be someone on staff who can proofread.
This is grumpy me talking. I don’t like being silenced by fine print. Actually, I don’t like being silenced at all. I also don’t like feeling like I’m being controlled or used. This is another reason why I’m not sure this is really the “next best job.” According to the Terms and Conditions (which is readily available on the website, and therefore according to item 10, I am allowed to re-publish and comment on)…
7. You and your partner each agree that all designs, plans, inventions, discoveries, improvements, software, copyright, know-how or other intellectual property, whether or not patentable or copyrightable, created by you and/or your partner, during the course of the provision of the Services or pertaining to any service, matter, thing, process or method related to the provision of the Services, or that may be useful or of benefit to Mason Horvath (collectively, the “Works”), and such Works created during a six (6) month period after termination or expiry of your provision of services to Mason Horvath (regardless of the circumstances for such termination or expiry), shall be the sole and absolute property of Mason Horvath. Without limiting the forgoing, you and your partner each hereby irrevocably waive all moral rights in the Works and the assigns and transfers to Mason Horvath the entire right, title and interest, domestic and foreign, of you and your partner in such Works, or, at the option of Mason Horvath, a lesser interest therein.
I understand the need for a legal clause stating that anything created within the six-month contract that relates to luxury travel and is a direct product of work in the “next best job” position would be the property of Mason Horvath. But for six-months following the contract too? Zellie commented on this clause on the IslandReefJob forum as well. I agree that it seems unreasonable to claim rights to everything produced after the contract has expired, particularly if your partner is a creative person, software engineer etc.
And then here’s the part where I said to myself “Are you serious?? Do you know how much time it takes to create a good quality video?”:
1. You and your partner must be available to provide the following services (the “Services”) to Mason Horvath or its nominess:
© produce and submit to Mason Horvath a minimum of two videos per week, such videos to be a minimum of two minutes in length, reporting on each Destination and/or Activity you and your partner have visited or participated in (as the case may be), such video to be prepared according to the guidelines and criteria maintained by Mason Horvath;
(d) produce and submit to Mason Horvath a thirty-second video on a daily basis from each Destination and/or Activity you and your partner have visited or participated in (as the case may be), such video to be prepared according to the guidelines and criteria maintained by Mason Horvath;
This is in ADDITION to the research of each destination and activity, “continuous updates” and daily blog posts, media interviews, and “other services.” Oh, and don’t forget you still have to create a video about a luxury activity in your hometown (which you have to source yourself) to even be considered for the Top 4. And then you have to go through a process of elimination “consist[ing] of challenges over one week that will require the contestants to search out and report on luxury experiences [ie more videos!] in this exotic location.”
Yes, I do realize a lot of this sounds like the original Best Job in the World. But, with the original campaign the successful applicant will have had four months to prepare video ideas, not have to source and negotiate deals for the activities on his / her own, have a home to go to at the end of the day to edit the one required video each week, and be paid twice as much.
I did the math. You can do it too. John from Channel Whitsunday had asked the Top 50 candidates a series of questions, one of which was “How many hours would you estimate that you have put into your campaign?” Not counting the time it took the applicants to create their video, or any work that they do on weekends, take the average amount of time each applicant spent per day on their campaign.
My application video, with the help of my sister and brother-in-law, took 14 hours to film and edit. This was a continuous 14 hours and does not include the time spent researching the Best Job in the World or creating the storyboard or background props. 14 hours per 60 seconds. You can take a different ratio if you like. Use whatever you think is a reasonable amount of time to create a good quality 60 second video. Now calculate how much time it would take to make seven 30 second videos and two videos that are each two minutes long.
If you add this to the average number of hours the successful applicant would spend on blogs and interviews each week, what do you get? How much time is left to plan, research and negotiate deals on activities at various destinations? How much time is left to enjoy the activities? Now calculate how much the successful candidate ends up earning between him/herself and his/her partner per hour and then take into consideration that anything created six-months after the contract is up is no longer his / her intellectual property. How much does each person earn during that year?
By my calculations, it really doesn’t sound like the “next best job.” And here I was thinking about how bad it’d be for the environment for someone to take this job!
PS Mason Horvath, there’s a grammatical error on your ‘Application and Selection Process — Video Submissions’ document as well. You’re missing ‘as’ in the paragraph after the Resume Evaluation portion of the Quality Assurance section, right before “personality testing.”
Yup, I mentioned to you that this campaign didn’t seem very professional– and I think you’ve concreted that for me.
They’ve presented an unreasonable (nay, impossible!) work load, and for such a relatively large company, that seems like an easily-avoided blunder. Do your research, guys! They clearly have no idea what is involved. I went to film & television school after working mainly with animation for 5 years. This is partially what made me appreciate your application video so much– that sort of quality takes time!
I don’t know much about this company, but their poor campaign strategy and lack of professionalism has more than once made me wonder.….. is this just one big scam, pulled off by some deadbeat sitting behind his computer? If so, what on earth could be gained?
Am I allowed to be so frank? I didn’t see these documents after all, and I’m not entering the “competition”. ^_^
I’m glad you’re giving this one a miss, Anny. I just hope we don’t see the media get proliferated by this sort of ‘offer’ now that the TQ campaign is virtually over. It’d kinda be like how Big Brother sort of spawned into a bazillion different tired reality knock-offs for tv. Gosh, we don’t need that again!
Of course you’re allowed to be frank Belinda!
To be frank, I’m surprised Mason Horvath did this. If you’re going to piggyback on a campaign, it’s expected that you will offer more incentive than what the original campaign advertised. This just looks bad. And I don’t think the media is going to get tied up with this campaign.
Wow. I’d say. What a circus!
You are obviously not just another cow in the flowing herd, you have enough spunk to turn around and go against the current. Fine print such as this would rub me the wrong way. Spelling errors from such a big deal is questionable also — because it makes you wonder how much time and effort (and possibly seriousness) was put into writing the letter in the first place. If they want to be taken seriously it needs to be professional, even if they are the ones offering. AND — if it is already a skinny road of what can be voiced — THAT SUCKS. It’s like come be with us and blog…well, what we allow you to blog. We will give you 50k under the condition we monitor what you can say. Like what the hell is this? It’s like signing up for the military or something
“signing it all over to Mason”
Also: If they already decided the top remaining 50 are qualified — there should be no need to make ANOTHER video about a hometown activity. To me that is just exercising a rerun and playing puppeteer with very tight strings. How about a DIFFERENT idea — the video is already made — test another skill of the contestants = for selection.
“HOW MANY hoops can we get them to jump through before we deem them good enough MOOGHAHAHA”
I wonder how much a job like this would really pay — one that isn’t on the media frenz.
I also wonder if their are deductions off that sum of money (some kind of tax?)
If they are a tourism company they should have these “activities” already lined up and ready to go. That PART of it should be done because anyone visiting these places, using their services, would be provided that. It’s not like they OWN the destinations and cities and just need THOSE advertised.
Tourism in a way. Is things to do and see. They need to have that part covered. And why. And selected two have to experience those and review them for the world.
I just really don’t see how making ANOTHER video will show any more or less about the contestants. Needs to be something else.
How you ended this entry = hahahah. Anny needs to be on the judging panel not the selection candidates!
For sure. They don’t have as tight of a leash on the remaining 50 as they would have imagined.
Thanks Kim!
I’m planning on asking Dean Horvath a lot of the questions people have posed on this blog as well as through e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. If you have questions you’d like me to include, please let me know!
Yep. The contest poker game: Know when to hold ‘em; Know when to fold ‘em; Know when to walk away; Know when to run…
Great job on the evaluation Anny, that’s insane.
That is ridiculous.. Sheesh!!!!!
I’m pretty stoked I chose not to get involved with it.
You’ve got much better things in your future I’m sure!
Haha, I love this! And I HATE feeling silenced, too. I made the mistake of leaking some big news on my blog from an e-mail I got from my MTV boss a few years back, and the president of the company sent me an e-mail demanding me to take it down! Not cool. I hate having to self censor.
LOL what kind of big news did you leak?
“I’ve requested an interview with Dean Horvath so I can hear his take on the “next best job”. I hope he has better news about it.35 minutes ago from TweetDeck”
yeah, yeah, Anny. Do that. Nothing like a face to face! Maybe the job is less Draconian than spelled out in the contract. The terms and conditions look like a standard text book ‘Employment Contract’ anyway without any provisions made to the temporal realities of the actual job. You went over that in excellent fashion.
Dean is aware it’s going to be filmed and he’s going to send me his schedule of availability. I’m looking to interview him within the next week. I hope to gain a brighter perspective on the “next best job.”
Thanks for posting about all this, Anny. Very smart to be debating the details of it all. One thing you didn’t mention but it stood out to me in my once-only read of their ad for the job. “Reimburse”. It made me wonder “When?” So you get paid bimonthly, presumably 1/12 of the $50K, and from that do you have to pay your airfare hither-and-yon and then apply to get the funds back? A person could go broke, depending on their schedule for reimbursement. Another thing that would make that job a no-go for us is living out of a suitcase, living in airports and airplanes. There’s no info about how many places one would have to travel to, how frequently, how far. And the last thing that got to me was, if it’s a luxury vacation thing, why the economy class airfare? What luxury traveller would do that? And especially this job, where it’s apparently all about travel… what a come-down to have to fly in non-luxury. Everybody knows that half of any travel experience, as reported to friends (or in this case to a blog) is about travel arrangements — how screwed up they were, waiting lineups, airport snafu’s, losing luggage, whatever. They HAVE to give this job person at least business class, IMHO.
Oh well, eh?
Great questions Kate! I’ll ask Dean during the interview I’m hoping to schedule sometime soon.
ALL OCEANS ALERT!!
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/wilddocs/
Jellyfish Invasion
Gad! This is one scary documentary, Anny! This looks to be a very serious situation. Tiny jellyfish less than an ounce can be lethal and have been seen nearly everywhere! Uh-oh…They mention the fatality of a swimmer in the GBR. He got just a tiny sting but died within days.
LOL The promo clip sounds like it could be a trailer for a new horror flick!
The Invasion of… *dun dun dun* The JELLYFISH!
Hey Anny -
Good to hear, actually. I’ve not had a response back yet — that’s how professional it is — and I’m seriously dubious as to whether this is even a genuine opportunity.
Will let you know what I get back, but I’m inclined to agree with you all the way on this one…
Holly x
I mentioned to Dean in my conversation with him today that several Top 50 applicants didn’t receive replies from him when they asked for more info. I think Brian from Curve Communications already read your comment though (see the Ning forum).