When a sponsor of an award ceremony, also win an award at the event, it gets you thinking… how impartial are awards?
I’ve received a number of emails saying the company I worked for had won an award, where we hadn’t entered. All we had to do was pay to promote our win – an off the shelf award if you will.
Are all awards the same? Is this just in the digital industry? Do clients and peers value awards or treat them with a sense of mistrust?
Are there any awards that are completely impartial with through judging criteria or am I just being a cynic after a few slightly suspect experiences?
Let me know your thoughts.
Awards are, pretty much exclusively, businesses. That is, they either make money buy selling awards, or by you attending the awards ceremony, or through the publicity / authenticity being the overseer of that award will give them. They are rarely out to just award things for the fun of it, or simply because you did a good job.
There are virtually no awards that actually award anything without some bias. Point me to the last award for anything, ever, where the winner wasn’t present, and you might be pointing me to an honest award – something where someone wins because of what they did, not because they paid to enter.
Unfortunately, we love awards. They mean nothing. we know they mean nothing. But my word, we covet them. And so we continue to pay those fees, and more and more awards keep on appearing, because ‘award winning’ is ‘award winning’ even if no one knows what the ‘award’ actually is.
It’s all bollocks. Awards. Events. Conferences. Blogs. They all need to stop. No one cares.
That just leaves the Nobel Peace Prize, then. And, btw, I agree with you 🙂