Oh yeah, of course: let’s announce some Awards. That’ll do. Everyone has Awards, so why not us? Let’s announce the Reel Show Awards. OK, it’s a bit of a lame title, but we can come back to that. So. Now. What kind of Awards shall we have?
Well, there are technology awards of course. They always go down well. At NAB, every magazine and his dog handed out Awards for technology. We probably missed a trick there.
What else? Oh, I know. We could do some Best Program-type Awards. Different genres: sitcom, reality TV, that sort of thing. I mean the fact that television stations and national newspapers also do this sort of thing whenever they can’t think of anything else to write about shouldn’t put us off. Everybody likes reading about Television Awards. It’s easy copy and you’re guaranteed a reaction if someone’s favorite program gets pipped at the post by Celebrity Dogsitting.
Anything else? Well, we could do some TYFBY (Thank You For Being You) Awards. These are great because the recipient needn’t have done anything impressive recently. They just get them for being generally good eggs.
Well, that’s quite a lot of options, and I’m not sure we can do them all. I know. Let the readers decide. Once you’ve finished reading this piece, please email pointless-awards@reel-show.tv to tell us which type we should go for. But first, let’s review the options in more detail.
Option 1: Product of the Year Award. This is the first type of Technology Award, and the purpose is to reward our existing advertisers. Come on, if someone’s put their hand in their pocket all year, the least we can do is give them a little gold logo they can use in their ad copy.
Option 2: Innovation Award. This is good because we can do these twice a year, at NAB and IBC. These are very different from the Product of the Year Award because they go to non-advertisers. These people are smart enough to realise that if we’ve spotted the profound importance of their new widget, then they’ll realise that we’re the kind of magazine they should advertise with. Innovation Awards are great because we can hand out as many of them as we want and no-one will shout “shenanigans” because none of these guys advertise with us yet.
OK, that’s the Technology Awards sorted – we’ll probably get six pages out of that next issue – eight if we have a formal ceremony and include a photo-spread of red-cheeked revellers in penguin suits and posh frocks, accompanied by some pithy if incomprehensible captions.
Option 3: TV/Film Awards. Don’t let it bother us that we already have the Oscars, Emmys, BAFTAs and numerous lesser events on TV ad nauseam. We can come up with a different slant. Besides, we can bash out 50 words of fluff on our favorite sitcom in seconds. And the beauty is that we can find a ‘sponsor’ for each Award, thus giving us extra ad revenue without us having to research or write any proper articles. A plan with no drawbacks. All we have to do is approach a manufacturer, posthouse or production company, get them to agree to sponsor an Award, then find a program they worked on or their kit was used on and give it a gong. We can even make an entire supplement out of it.
Option 4: the Thank You For Being You Awards. These are the magazine equivalent of those Channel 4 six-hour marathons, like The Nation’s 100 Favourite Scenes From 80s Soap Operas That Include At Least One Farm Animal and a Song by Kajagoogoo. The beauty of these is that, not only do they generate pages and pages of easy copy, but we can do one each issue (Top 100 Gaffers Who Live In The Droitwich Area, etc). Thing is, potential advertisers always love reading about themselves, and with the TYFBY Awards, they get to read about themselves almost every issue, without us having to do any research to see if they’ve done anything recently. And they can even run ads saying, “Congratulations to our customer for winning a such-and-such award”.
Why didn’t I think of this before? We can fill half the magazine with Awards-related material. It’ll be considerably easier than writing proper stories, and it’ll give our ‘sponsors’ a reason to come back time and time again. All I need now is someone to judge the Awards. Where’s our ad sales team when you need them?
Note: if anyone has any other good schemes for getting people to part with their money without us having to do any real work, please email me at moneyforoldrope@reel-show.tv
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Denise HaskewAfter 10 years as a television commissioning editor, Denise decided she needed a more intellectual challenge, so she gave it up to become a model. She has done all sorts of useless jobs, such as magazine publishing and PR. She plans to be on the first big spaceship to leave the Earth, alongside all the telephone sanitizers. |