Wired Cola

As promised. First, you may wish to read my post-contest malediction, which also usefully includes links to the most relevant pages regarding the contest and my efforts to win a Nissan Cube. Done?

The best marketer-side analysis is by Jesse Hirsh, and in particular his post-awards note explains that (quite sensibly) Nissan and its marketers saw Tuesday night as the beginning of their campaign, not the culmination.

My essay here is mostly contestant-side, and I'll explain what I did and why, what I think I should have done, and how I felt about the contest. Note of course that you're getting a perspective that is personal, possibly naïve, and that of a loser, not a winner.

Lots to say. So much so that this is not the promised contest post-mortem. This is a set of off-the-cuff recriminations coming almost immediately after hearing the contest results.
I did not win. Many others did, notably the seriously deserving Rannie Turingan.
Had I won, this post would have been filled with grateful thanks to the many friends who contributed to this mad project to prove that nerdiness could have a creative expression, and the beginning of making it up to those people.
Instead, I need to blame those people.