Have We Reached Awards Event Overkill?

Disclaimer: This post isn’t intended as a dig at any awards event organiser, whether mentioned in this post or not. On the contrary, I’m a fan of awards events and have submitted (and will continue to submit) campaigns to them, now and in the future, on behalf of myself and my clients. This post is simply an observation on the current status of the awards industry as a whole.

Recently I’ve been submitting one of the campaigns that I created for a client to various SEO/marketing awards events – the first time I have ever done so. While we sadly didn’t get through to the finals of Canmol 2015 (the Wales Marketing Awards), we were shortlisted in two categories in the UK Search Awards 2015, which took place in London last week. I also have my sights set on a few awards events taking place in 2016 – we’ve submitted the campaign to one of them (shortlist TBC) and there are at least two or maybe three others that I’m considering in the New Year.

One thing I’ve noticed though? I thought that there would be only one or two awards applicable to me. With this campaign alone, I have found at least half a dozen. And it seems that – in South Wales at least – a few more have sprung up really recently, only in the last year or so.

It has me a little concerned… Are we reaching a point of ‘peak’ awards do? Are there too many of them out there, which are in turn devaluing the status that a person obtains when he/she wins an award and becomes “award-winning?” Honestly, I don’t know – I don’t have the answer, but I thought that I’d air my views and potentially start a discussion on the topic…

The “new car” phenomenon in play?

I’ll happily admit that the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon could be in play here. You know when you buy a new car, and then you notice other people driving the same make/model more often than you did previously – maybe even in the same colour? As mentioned above, this was my first time submitting something to awards shows, so it makes sense that I’m simply more aware of them now. Let’s also not ignore the fact that many of my fellow Welsh ICE members have been up for awards recently, with multiple members shortlisted in the Caerphilly Business Awards 2015. Many of them were tweeting about it, so it could be the case that I’m seeing more tweets about awards, leading me to believe that there are more awards out there than there actually are…

Then again… New awards in just the last few months include the Entrepreneur Wales Awards, the Cardiff Business Awards, The Regional Awards (which includes Cardiff), the Cardiff Music Awards, and various offerings from The Drum, including The Drum Content Marketing Awards (in fact you can see the full list of The Drum’s different awards events here). And while I deliberated about writing this post over the weekend, I was casually browsing Twitter and noticed that the Business Growth Awards South Wales had just been announced. That’s a lot of new awards events all of a sudden – especially those originatining from and/or having a focus on the Cardiff/South Wales region.

Why award ceremonies are win-win (no pun intended)…

I understand the appeal of awards events – not only for the nominees (naturally) but also for the organiser. People will pay for tickets to attend, and if they’re nominees then it’s extremely likely that they’ll attend, so you’re guaranteed numbers to a certain extent. Therefore they’re a fairly risk-free type of event to run: you have a higher chance of predicting attendee numbers than you may do with many other types of events, which means that you can budget accordingly – and maybe even predict profitability fairly accurately, too. It’s win-win for pretty much everyone involved: attendees have a good night out, (some) nominees win awards, and the organiser can run an event that has a good chance of succeeding and making a nice profit.

However, there’s always the case that you can have too much of a good thing…

Too much = across-the-board devaluation?

The problem is that if there are too many awards events, more people have more chance of winning awards. This means more people with “award-winning” added to their websites, business cards and 60-second pitches. The more award-winning people you have, the less the term remains special. If you have a sector with – say – 100 businesses in it and only one or two are award-winning, then they truly stand out as the industry leaders. But if 50+ of those 100 businesses are award-winning, who stands out as the industry leader? No one.

It’ll then boil down to this: the type of award being important. Winning a big category in a big, long-established, industry-specific awards event is going to be more impactful than winning a small, easily-obtainable award in a more general business awards event. Depending on your sector and the type of clients that you attract, hopefully they’ll recognise this, but it’s not to say that they necessarily will…

The cost vs. the benefits

As potential nominees and attendees of such events, it also gets a point where you have to decide which ones to enter, which ones to attend, etc. – simply because attending all of them would be nigh on impossible from a purely financial point of view.

Fellow State of Digital blogger Sam Noble made a fantastic point about this in a recent article about entering awards, which included an insight into the cost involved in entering and attending just one of them:

One of the recent awards we entered cost [our agency]:

• £195 to enter
• £200 per person for the ticket to the ceremony
• £40 per person for travel
• £200 for a hotel

That’s a grand total of £835 and this doesn’t take into consideration two people out of the office for a day and a half.

Imagine the budget you would need as a business to enter all the awards on my current list of 67!!

The more of them that you enter, the more you feel obliged to attend (after all, if you’re nominated, you don’t want to risk not going and then you end up winning…)! Back in the days when there were only one or two, it was a no-brainer – it’s only a biannual occurence, so it’s fine. But going to a few in a few months (or even a few in one month) means that that bank balance is going to get hit ridiculously hard.

Where do we go from here?

For people who want to go to (and win) awards, it’s about honing your efforts on the awards events that are particularly important to you (whether in terms of status and/or potential client acquistion as a result of winning) and/or those where you think you stand a good chance of winning – I recommend reading Sam’s post (link above) especially.

For those who organise events, your sector is becoming very competitive… Rather than putting on an event and expecting everyone to flock to it, people may pick-and-choose which ones to enter and which ones to go to. Obviously those that are industry-specific, backed-up by an association or institution, fairly-priced and do not show any sort of judging bias will do well I’d imagine.

But if you’re thinking of starting an awards event, I’d be careful. It’s getting crowded out there.

[Trophies image credit – Brad.K]