Today’s the last day to vote on your favorite user-generated Doritos commercial. I just purchased two bags for five bucks at my local odor-infested Met Foods, and after downing 60% of one bag within twenty minutes, I feel comfortable saying Doritos =evil and my pants are tight.

I can’t access any of the videos thanks to the Bank’s productivity-enhancing, Sarbanes-Oxley complying firewall. But according to the January 15 ish of AdWeek, “Checkout Clerk” was created “by a woman named Kristen Dehnert, a location scout for advertising who really wants to direct”, and “Mousetrap” “is the work of Billy Federighi, a film school grad, and his co-director, Brett Snider, who already have a user-generated spot for Converse on-air.”

Adds Barbara Lippert:

Is “consumer-generated professional” an oxymoron? … What the Doritos finalists prove is that while it’s great to think of consumer-generated content as the ultimate revolutionary democratization of the media, in the end the people participating are not your average Joes.

I suppose it depends on how you define “participating”. Taking the democracy analogy back to … democracy, the act of voting is participation. So, anyone who votes on their favorite spot is a participant — and with regards to making a commercial, assuming I can vote once I get home tonight, I’m an average Joe. Plus, we don’t see the 1,100 other entries; I bet there were a ton of average entries.

And anyway, our democracy doesn’t allow for average Joes to win, either. But it’s not an enlightened despotism, and it’s not a monarchy. Sure, it’s fraught with imperfection, and it’s not like I don’t think about Democracy 2.0 du temps en temps. But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to suggest that A is at odds with B…

• Where A is the fact that the users that generated finalist entries in the Doritos challenge happen to be interested in becoming Legit(TM)
• And B is the notion that consumer-generated content contests is media democratization in action

I mean, this kinda stuff — maybe it’s kinda like the Star Search or American Idol for people who want to break in the industry but don’t have the connections, vocational school degree, or knowledge of “getting a book together and applying at agencies.” (No, Barbara, it may shock you that not everyone is born into a college-educated professional family that has an understanding of these things; tsk tsk to you for your classist sarcasm.)

It’s not like we get riled up when people who take singing lessons, have nice voices, and want to be singers when they grow up win American Idol. So why should user-generated create-your-own-commercial contests be any different? So what if hopeful pros all become the finalists of contests like this?

Isn’t that the point of a meritocratic democracy? To increase the correlation between demonstrated talent and attainment of “success”?