It’s a yearly ritual. Sometime around midnight after the AV Awards have been given out, a dinner guest in black tie will metaphorically (and sometimes physically) poke me in the chest and say “We should have won that category.” Some of them are even together enough to ask “Why didn’t we?” In truth, the language is usually riper than that, but you get the idea.
The genuine answer is “The entry that won the category was better than yours”. It’s always been tempting to say “You didn’t win because your entry was crap” – which is all too often the case – but I’ve always been reluctant to ruin a great evening.
In a way, the people who take the direct approach are easiest to deal with. The real pains are the petulant sulkers - people and companies who are so convinced of their god-given right to be top of the pile that they simply don’t enter any more and (in some extreme cases) no longer even attend the awards.
As an aside, the best ever was a household-name projector company (no longer active in the market) which was so convinced that it was going to win that it put the awards logo on all its ads, invited several tables of people and then refused to pay its drinks bill when it was only a finalist. Other bad losers have even been known to decamp immediately after the awards were given out and not talk to anyone for the rest of the night.
Human frailty and the demon drink aside, the root of the problem is the mixture of arrogance and incompetence with which some companies approach the entry process.
After ten awards competitions – which have involved over 170 awards, 450-plus finalists and more than 1,000 entries as well as 50 different judges – there are still people who don’t read the ‘exam paper’ and answer the questions asked. For example, one top company will put in an entry detailing its finances, its way of working, its technical achievements, its marketing successes and its projects. Another will attach a few 100-word case studies that provide no detail to its mission statement and wonder why the judges were not exactly enthused.
Over the years, we’ve seen the lot. Some people confuse quantity with quality and send in folders full of unstructured material. Others send in a single sheet of A4, or five PowerPoint slides. Too few explain what has made them different, what successes they have had and how that has been to the benefit of the user – all important judging criteria that have always been detailed in the entry packs.
The reality is that even a brilliant entry can’t make a winner out of a lousy submission or project, but a poorly constructed entry can have an adverse effect on a good project or company submission. Confusing the judges (by, for example, stating turnover figures in several different ways to make them appear better than they are) doesn’t gain points. And I’ve seen entries about projects which I know well (and have written about) which completely miss the point. As the judges are only allowed to work with the materials put in front of them, that means those projects tend to miss out.
Since 1979, when we ran the first AV Awards, the business has changed technologically, matured and become both more prosperous and more important. But the average quality of awards entries has not kept pace.
That leaves us in a quandary. We could simplify the awards process (by, for example, producing templates that everyone had to fill in), but that would penalise the best entrants, the ones who take trouble and really care. And the last thing we want to do is to dilute the quality of the awards or their independence. We don’t really want them to be too easy to win.
So, unless anyone out there has a really good solution, I’ll have to put up with the prodders.
Peter Lloyd is the former editor in chief of AV Magazine and was non-voting chairman of the judging panels for the ten AV Awards competitions held so far. He can be contacted at peterlloydAV@hotmail.co.uk
