There are awards for everything and you don’t have too look far to find them. Why just this week there were four award-related pieces of business on Media Savant’s radar. The first was a Media Alert drafted for the news about Token Media (http://www.token.com/shortfilms) and its film-making crew (that extends into the greater Twin Cities community) winning the national 48-Hour short film festival and having another film place first runner-up in the world (out of 3,000 entries). The second was a request from some ad agency pals at Morsekode (www.Moresekode.com) wanting their peeps to vote for them in the annual Webby Awards (come, on, help ‘em out by clicking on Healthcare Lane at: http://webby.aol.com/services/insurance !)
The third was drafting an award announcement for Creative Water Solutions, the coolest natural, greenest water conditioning/treatment company in the world (www.cwsnaturally.com). It recently won two awards for its game-changing use of sphagnum moss to dramatically reduce chemicals loads, maintenance times, and damage to pool and spa equipments and the irritating side effects to pool and spa users like burning eyes, dry scalp and hair, etc.
The fourth was by way of subscribed information from the brilliant and practical minds at Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com), which sent this notice out along with other newsy, cultural trends and insights:
The AmeriStar competition is billed as the Oscars of the packaging industry by the Institute of Packaging Professionals, the nonprofit org that sponsors the contest. The clothes, hairstyles and gossip aren’t quite as over the top as a Hollywood affair, but the emotions displayed are authentic and the camaraderie among the guests can be inspiring.
The winners — people with titles like packaging engineer, graphic designer and R&D director — finally get recognized for all their hard work.
Should clients seek awards as a way of raising their visibility? It depends on how you leverage them. The entry process can be time-consuming for your PR person and you. Unless you have won a prestigious-plus award like The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, or a similar one, you probably won’t get a feature news story out of it but rather a few sentences in local media publications. So why do it?
A true client experience says it all. A few years ago, the founder and CEO of a leading remodeling company/client that had won literally 30 or 40 awards for its work, warily asked in a meeting if we should enter the XYZ awards again.
“Gee, we’ve won it so often I wonder if it even matters any more,” he sighed.
“How do you customers feel about awards? I asked.
“They like them, they like to see us win them even more.” And there was his answer.
Awards are often critical for building your credibility within your industry and in the public at large, and occasionally you also will get media exposure for it. Now… here are the forms for the next one, due in about three days. Better get crackin’ .