Well Dearies, the John Mayer/Citibank #BKLovesMayer contest winner was supposed to be chosen on 12/4/13. After spending countless hours of several days searching every single one of the 3,000+ photos entered I finally found the winner! It has not been publicly displayed on any websites yet, therefore I am not going to show it to you or tell you who submitted the winning photo. If you are so inclined & crazy like I am you can scroll through all the entries on Instagram & read the comments. I will tell you her’s was definitely in the first half if not the first quarter of the entries.
Now if you remember correctly, This contest was to submit photos of who or what you love. It was set up with the release of John Mayer & Katy Perry’s single “Who You Love” off the Paradise Valley album. There were 6 pages of what was labeled as “Official Contest Rules” which included how the contest was supposed to be judged. I use the word “supposed” very loosely as I am going to explain herein. You can also find the complete set of rules using the following link: http://citi-john-mayer.herokuapp.com/pdfs/CitiJohnMayerInstagramContestRules.pdf
If you perused the pics on Instagram for this contest you would notice that not many people actually followed the rules. There were tons of ordinary family, bf & gf, pets, John Mayer, & guitar pics submitted. Very few of any of the photos had any kind of good caption with them. It really should have been narrowed down to 10-20 enteries at the most! The following is a quote directly from the rules posted by Billboard.com who was a sponsor of this contest:
“4. WINNER SELECTION AND NOTIFICATION. On or about December 4, 2013,
one (1) potential grand prize winner will be selected by John Mayer who will judge all
eligible Entries received throughout the Promotion Period based on criteria that will
include aesthetics, creativity, voice, visual impact, sensitivity, originality, creativity of
caption, and clarity) In the event of a tie, the Entry among the tied Entries with the
highest score in visual impact will be deemed the potential grand prize winner.”
So this would lead one to believe that you’d have to present a pretty good picture. It would most likely be a picture that a person put some serious thought & effort into creating. Those are pretty steep criteria for judging the winner. Not to mention to be chosen by Mr. John Mayer himself! (wow I just had a willy wonka flashback! lol) I would think John Mayer would be a pretty tough judge on the above criteria. Needless to say, the photo was of a lady with her grandpa sitting on a porch holding a guitar. Lovely picture yes, but contest winning material…
I’m not picking on this girl. It certainly isn’t her fault that this MACPresents (who is apparently in charge of setting things like this up) chose her picture. Is it b/c she started following @MACPresents on Instagram or b/c she begged with little emoji praying hands? Who knows, but I certainly do not believe John Mayer was the judge of this contest which is quite disturbing since they advertised he was!
So basically there are 2 theories of thought here. He couldn’t spare the time over the full week between the closing date of the contest & the date of winner notification & didn’t even bother to look at them. And for the record It wouldn’t have taken very long especially if he had someone weeding out the unoriginal ones. It wasn’t like there were 20,000 photos. Or he just picked any ole picture without really giving any thought to it. Either way, I am personally insulted that John Mayer didn’t have the courtesy to take this contest seriously!
There is no doubt in my mind that there are going to be many other fans who have similar feelings. Morgan & I have spent countless hours driving, not sleeping, & waiting in lines , not to mention the financial part! All done out of love for an artist who we thought gave a rat’s ass about his fans! Now only to look at the whole situation & say to ourselves, “We were wrong all along. He really doesn’t care anymore.” I told Morgan from the get go not to get her hopes up, but still we had some great entries that ranged from emotional to artistic & she should have had a good chance! Sadly not! All of our entries are on my previous post. You can judge for yourself.
So it is with a heavy heart & almost with tears in my eyes that I think I’m retiring from this blog. It has been great fun. I thank each & every one of you for being here whether you were regular readers or just happened by once in a while. You’re support has meant a great deal to me & I’m glad I could entertain you a bit. I may someday return, but as of right now I have lost a great deal of respect & need to step back from John Mayer a bit. We were going to buy tickets to see JM in Connecticut on 12/16, but I refuse to spend another dime on him right now. This just seems like it was a joke & the John Mayer I’ve known & loved wouldn’t have let it be made into such a mockery.
Ciao Lovies!
Perhaps we will run across each other at another time!
Chasing John Mayer 