Bass was the featured plate at the 2006 PRWeek Awards. Reactions to the succulent seafood ranged from curiosity to puzzlement. Seafood at a banquet is always a risk, particularly one in which the audience is all about perception. And sources say it may not be the most appropriate offering. According to the Etiquette Queen at party411.com “guests paying to attend a ceremony should be offered a choice between meat and fish.”
PRWeek obviously told the Etiquette Queen to take a hike and stood by its bass decision.
Funny thins was that bass wasn’t the only fish in the room that evening — the comedian was pretty ripe. Nothing against the guy at all — but he was introduced as a contributor to John Stewart’s The Daily Show and we all thought it would be Stephen Colbert. This guy either had an off night or he was overwhelmed trying to go through a comedy routine with 1000 communicators in the audience. Saying the room was a little chatter happy would be a slight understatement.
Actually, the bass reaction really set the tone for the evening. It was an evening of surprises — good surprises. APCO won agency of the year and Entergy pulled in campaign of the year. Huge kudos to both organizations. The student of the year, Tara Burnham from Penn State, and the young professional of the year, Courtney Hill of H&K, were definite highlights. Congrats to both. Fast Horse out of Minnesota won community relations campaign of the year for its work with Blue Cross/Blue Shield — beating out the large firms such as Ruder Finn and Cohn & Wolfe. Congrats to Yorg and Allison — good people who worked long hours to get the job done. More on these two later.
The turnout was great — I would guess more than 1000 attended the ceremony at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, NY. If you haven’t been to Tavern on the Green — my colleague Stacy Libby summed it up quite nicely as we walked through the maze of mirrors and stained glass making our way to the reception area.
“I feel like we are walking into one of the those parties in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. We’re just missing the nudity and the masks.”
Yes indeed.
I sat at table 93 next to Bite Communication’s Burghardt Tenderich along with Andrew Gordon (king of Silicon Valley PR reporting), Matthew Allington (I think everyone in tech PR has met Matthew at least once) and Keith O’Brien (this guy gets the social media movement in PR like no one else). Burghardt heads up North Americas for Bite. It was a good pairing. He shares my belief that PR, great PR, is not infinitely scalable. Just because you can apply an advertising model to PR doesn’t necessarily mean you should. I could ramble on and on about this — but PR is absolutely about people period. Our key assets go home every night. The ideas and the chemistry between our people and our clients is the essence of our differentiation. That means that we need to nurture our assets and help them grow and provide them a place where they can take the magic to our customers. You can’t do that if you scale into 80 people offices or 100s of offices worldwide. You just can’t manage the talent and if you can’t manage them, they will leave. And once those people leave, they don’t leave a product that someone else can step into and keep developing. They leave and they take their ideas and that chemistry with them.
OK, enough of the stump speech.
PRWeek’s panel of judges, while still made up of mostly the large conglomerates, found a way to get it right. I was a judge (with Michael Kempner, president of MWW, Jim Finn of Ingres, Mark Hass, president of MS&L) and witnessed the process myself. It is a thorough examination and it is as fair as it can be. The tipping scale is the amount of time and money that each firm can invest into the award submissions. A smaller firm just can’t take the amount of time and money the larger firms do to wow the panels. And it was obvious because this was the year of the conglomerate, deservedly so.
The process worked. Voce did not win its category, and that is disappointing. But the judges found a way to get through what seemed like 15 award submissions from each global agency and find the hidden jewels — like Fast Horse.
Highlights of the evening:
As we walk up to the bar to get our first drink of the night, the bar tender stops and says, “hey buddy, no offense but ooh la la” as he points to Stacy. Ooh la la is such an underrated pick up line. And I obviously look weak and irrelevant to that bar tender as he picks up on the girl with me.
Stacy ran into her mentor from Porter Novelli, Gary Stockman. Gary is president of Porter-Novelli. From what I hear, one of the real good guys in PR. When asked if he runs the world now as president of Porter Novelli his response, “the world runs me.” It never changes.
Ray’s pizza in Times Square at 3:00am. Surreal but wonderful.
We closed two different bars with Yorg and Allison from Fast Horse. Allison was mobbed by her fans when they saw the award. She signed all the autographs, staying true to her roots. Allison and Stacy posed for a Midwestern girl shot.
Yorg showed us a photo of his boat. Mostly a sunset shot with like a small corner of his boat. But it was a nice corner shot of his boat. And let me be the first to say that I would hang over that corner and shout out “I am king of the world!” I do that for you, Yorg.
Allison was offered some form of sex for a cigarette by one of the bar patrons.
Thanks to Julia and the team for a very nice event. PRWeek is to be commended for its industry leadership.
– Richard Cline
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