I think I’m going to start a video awards competition. Now, I’m not talking about a film festival, like New York’s Chelsea Film Festival or Los Angeles’ Silver Lake Film Festival. These are all about artistic films, not purpose-produced video. They’re also real, tangible, physical events, which take place all over their communities with as much local color and texture as the Tulip Time Festival in Holland, Mich., or the Valparaiso Popcorn Festival in Valparaiso, Ind. But that’s too much work.
I want to start an awards program just like all the competitions I receive flyers for all year long: a virtual festival, one with no theaters and no awards ceremonies… maybe not even a street address. Just a place to send the checks.
LICENSE TO PRINT MONEY
Never mind the dozen or two mailers which Joe the Mailman dumps in my inbox over the course of a year; there are actually hundreds—if not thousands—of these competitions out there. A quick Web search turns up scores of legitimate-seeming sites for awards both highly specialized and hopelessly generalized, with typical entry fees from $50 to $250. In almost every case, the listing of last year’s winners runs into the hundreds of names; it would have been quicker to list those who entered but didn’t place.
As near as I can tell, you don’t need much to get one of these babies launched: a suitably pompous foundation name, a sharp-looking Web site, and a statuette with a goofy nickname, like the Sloopy or the Itsy. Sillier is better.
There are several fundamental rules that all video awards organizations are bound by.
Rule 1: Everybody wins… or nearly everybody. Winning makes people happy, and that’s what we want most… to make people happy. Happy enough to enter! What’s the point of entering a competition if you’re not going to win?
Rule 2: There’s got to be a significant entry fee. If the fee isn’t significant, how good can the festival be? The logic is irrefutable: “If you want to win big, you need to spend big.” So don’t be a loser—cough it up.
Rule 2A: The statuette or plaque isn’t included in the entry fee. You know you want it. It’s really, really shiny, and it has your name on it, so how could you not want to pay extra for it?
One of the ways to guarantee that everybody wins something is to have an infinite number of categories, like Best Non-Bloody Surgical Video and Best Video of a Greasy Transaxle. Of course, just in case your program itself doesn’t win, you’ll want to hedge that bet by entering your own considerable talents for a craft award, like Best Microphone Technique Involving A Silk Blouse. In the end, the goal is to provide each entrant with a category, which appears to fit uniquely well in addition to all the others he or she will blindly enter with no hope of winning.
Entering my competition will be a streamlined process, made as painless as possible by the elimination of boring questions about purpose and intended audience and instructional design. I envision a space for the program name, one for the entrant’s name, and a line for the credit card number. Shouldn’t really need much else. Oh, and the category, I guess. And to keep it honest—to showcase the entrant’s competitive spirit—I’ll include a checkbox labeled “I Want To Win (check here).”
We’ll need judges, too, because we’ll want everything to be above board. Everyone knows that agreeable judges are much more fun than crabby judges, so that’s who we’ll recruit; credentials in the business aren’t required, since experienced professionals are more likely to get testy as they watch hundreds of hours of everyday, garden-variety video programming. One awards Web site I researched listed the judges’ credentials: “Visual Artist and Tango dancer;” “Attorney;” “Vocalist, bassist, and guitarist;” and “Learning Specialist in the Math Lab.” Really.
AWARDS AS REWARDS
For most of us, the only return on our awards investment is the ability to decorate the lobby, or the edit suite, or the break room, with our accumulated booty—plaques, certificates, statues and silver nut-dishes.
Occasionally, though, these otherwise-worthless-seeming awards and competitions can actually generate real monetary return. One corporate client of ours mistakenly tossed out the notion of winning an award during his performance review last year—and promptly found it on his list of personal benchmarks for this year. Translation: No statuette equals no bonus. The likely candidate for an award was our video celebrating his firm’s merger into a larger organization; when the merger fell through, the video was shelved, and the client’s desperation was palpable.
Not to worry, though, one of his staffers dug up a competition with that one special category which fit like no other: an entire section for Video Presentations Cancelled Prior To Release.
Bingo.
