And the winner is...

In March I went to Austin, Texas, the former home of George Bush Jr before his promotion, and the current home to the SXSW festival, a kind of Sundance Festival for music, film and interactive media. As part of the festival, there was an awards ceremony, a relatively sumptuous affair, where various categories were honoured and fancy glass gongs were up for grabs. We won two of the categories as well as a Best of Show award and, for the next couple of days, we couldn't walk out of our hotel without shouts of congratulation and slaps on the back.

It hasn't changed our lives here at Preloaded, though. Things are still the same apart from a slightly fuller shelf. We are still looking for clients and striving to do the best work we can in the time and budgets we have to work with. It hasn't made the job any easier and we don't have lists of clients queuing up to work with our 'award-winning' team. So why do we still enter things for awards?

It's certainly not because it's cheap to do. Entering the BAFTA this year cost £125 a pop, and going to the awards ceremony will set you back over £200 per person, which effectively negates entries by innovative creative designers working alone. Ceremonies like this seem to be geared much more for larger companies, providing a location to schmooze, network and entertain clients. What could be better for a client-agency relationship than going out, winning an award and getting drunk on champagne together? Don't get me wrong, this is no bad thing as the cogs of business have to be greased somehow, but it does seem that it isn't about creative excellence so much as company status within a small industry.

Bare in mind, also, that awards are almost always a profit-making exercise. There are hundreds of independent (and not so independent) bodies, only too keen to liberally dish out gongs for a price, and many of them mean absolutely nothing; only existing because of the vanity of companies gullible enough to pay them money.

Great work should get recognised and commended. Creating pedestals of excellence will push the industry forward and increase standards, whether it be a lone designer working on a pet project from a bedroom, or a multinational advertising agency adding a digital element to a campaign. In theory, a company is only as good as the last piece of work it produces, especially for the smaller studios, so anything to motivate quality must be a good thing.

The D&AD's are probably the most prestigious awards for creative excellence in our field at the moment, though they don't seem to have truly grasped or understood interactive media yet, which is a shame. So this still leaves room for others; unbiased, not-for-profit sites like linkdup or Surfstation could do well to branch into this field and generate a series of awards which actually reflect creativity and the high standards which are out there, but which go unrecognised and unrewarded. Hopefully, that is where the future of acclaim can lie in the multifaceted arena of digital media in which we work. We have been nominated for a BAFTA this year, and by the time you read this, our shelf may or may not be a little busier.

Of course, it would be great to win one (I've held one and they are wonderfully heavy) but either way, life goes on, work still needs to be done, bills need to be paid and creative excellence needs to be strived for. My mum would be proud, though, and, of course, I'd thank her in my speech.

  , Business Director, Preloaded Ltd.
Originally published in .NET Magazine, December 2002.