Awards as PR branding events

A great way to get PR is to make news. It’s always better to make news if it’s positive. Giving out awards on a regular, usually annual basis, let’s the press know when to expect it. If the award is given out in a way that is on the level with no bias, then it can become news. If the award is from a poll of regular people, not within the industry, it has further credibility.

The interesting thing about awards and recognition is that the awards can resonate off of the brand. One of my favorites is the Nielson ratings of TV shows. We’ve all heard about them. But, as you’re probably aware, the entire TV business is a very small percentage of the Nielson revenue stream. However, they acknowledge that the recognition they get from giving those awards away is enormous for the company.

Same with the group that literally stole the idea, J. D. Power and Associates. They were and are a consulting company. They realized if they gave awards away in one of their product sectors, the resulting awareness of their company would help all of their market niches. They were sold recently to McGraw Hill for an undisclosed fortune.

We’re talking to one of our clients about an annual award presentation. They make rugged hard drives. You can drop them from 7 feet and they will continue working. They sell to many kinds of companies that need indestructible data storage, including the British Secret Service. One group of happy customers is the documentary film makers who go to deserts and other areas where they need to be sure that their hard drives recording their entire film don’t get destroyed. That’s an easy one for people to understand. So we’re talking about the idea of them giving an award each year to the best documentary film recorded out in the field. The PR they get for giving that award away will increase their stature among their corporate and defense clients.

Publishing the information on a Web site means that people can go back and see who won.

For 27 years I produced a show that was intended to increase the brand recognition for my company. It was a music awards show to get press for a music magazine. For a quick case study of the Bammies go to http://www.placemakinggroup.com/cs_bam.shtml

If you’d ever like to talk more about how this can be useful to you, just let me know.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Advertising, Marketing, Publicity, Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.