My Apogee Award

It Was a Night Of Glamour, Celebrities and Recognition For My Work

By Scott Lewis
Managing Director, PR, Willard

In early September, it was my distinct pleasure to have been among those honored at the fifth annual Apogee Awards. 

The awards show, broadcast on a national cable channel, was held at Palace Ukraina and the house was packed with the nation’s ‘A List’ celebrities.  The pre-function cocktail reception was a glittering affair and it just got better from there forward. 

About 15 minutes into the evening, my wife actually seemed to suffer celebrity fatigue. 

She knows all the country’s show-biz luminaries and the lurid tabloid gossip about each of them, but was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stars in attendance.  Her running commentary would typically start with, “Look! That’s Poharchuk, the director!  He’s married to Alyona, the singer, but she’s really a secret lesbian who loves…”  Finally she maxed out: Pugachova and Alsou could have had a knife fight in front of her by the end of the evening and she wouldn’t have noticed.
 
I was there to receive the 2009 Apogee for narrative fiction.  As I remarked during my all-too-brief acceptance speech, “When you’re six years old and you tell a good story, your mother reminds you that little boys who lie go to Hell.  At ten, your schoolmates deride you with taunts of ‘Liar, liar! Pants on fire!’  At 17, your stories titillate your pals and infuriate your girlfriend.  At 25, they get you a job and now, as an adult in the later years of a career, they earn you an Apogee Award!”

The crowd loved that line… It’s just a damn shame that none of the foregoing ever really happened.  Yet my imaginary Apogee Award is as real as many of the ersatz honors doled out to businesses in this country each year. 

Bill Whiting, a college friend who has gone on to have a long career doing PR in the American nuclear power industry, once gave me a bit of advice so solid that I’ve tried to follow it all my life.

“Don’t read your own news releases,” is what Bill told me.  In other words, when you or someone else writes some self-serving promotional fluff about you, don’t take it to heart.  Bill understood the power of humility.  He knew that reading glowing reviews of the work he had done – regardless of the author – could cause an ego problem.  Bill was a self-effacing, modest guy to start out with and he never let insincere, promotional, or self-generated praise go to his head.

Bill would like Ukraine, but the way that advertising and PR people here ceaselessly bang their own drums would make him wince.

People in our industry regularly perpetrate a crime against intellectual honesty by encouraging and participating in bought-and-paid-for award programs.

After almost a decade in Ukraine, I’ve become more jaded about contests and awards than I ever felt possible. Is there an honest contest to be found?  Probably, but for every competition that is straight-up honest, there are many total frauds.
 
First are the ‘consumer choice’ awards, which offer so many categories that a stray dog could win a gold medal in one of them – if he had the entry fee.  

One of the most conspicuous contests is “Choice of the Year” organized by TNS Ukraine, a respected research firm.  They offer awards in dozens of categories, some so narrowly defined as to be laughable.  The contest (slogan: “Choose the Best – Confidently Buy!”) awards medals for “Best Belarusian Products Store of the Year” in Kyiv. 

To quote humorist Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.”

‘Choice’ offers pharmaceutical categories for best “preparation against varicose veins” and best “preparation against herpes.”  It sub-divides classifications to the point of absurdity, with medals for both “Best real estate agency of the year,” and for “Best elite real estate agency of the year.”

The contest organizers maintain that if a company enters in a category, is declared the winner, but elects not to purchase the 1,500 euro ‘participant’s package,’ no winner will be announced in that category.  In my view, that makes the contest a pay-to-win endeavor. 

The TNS contest is patently silly.  It is an example of what I believe is wrong with the nation’s obsession with awards.

Then there are the ‘reader polls’ conducted by newspapers, magazines and websites. These could be fun, if not insightful, but they’re subverted by the shameless electioneering of the nominees, who send e-mails to everyone in their address book, imploring recipients to go to such-and-such web address to vote for them.  Never mind that the voter has never been to the site or read the publication before, or doesn’t understand Ukrainian, or lives in Jakarta and has no real idea who deserves to win.

These contestants should be blushing.  Instead, when they win, they act as though they’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize.  One agency went so far as to note on its business cards that it was “officially” the best, based on winning a reader poll.  It looked as though parliament has passed a resolution to the effect, later ratified by the Orthodox Church.  This is shameless self-promotion run amok.  It is made worse, in my book, because the agency in question does genuinely good work, and has many satisfied clients.  The agency, and others like it, shouldn’t have to stuff ballot boxes to get a certificate for their wall or a trophy for their lobby. 

As Bill observed many years ago, they shouldn’t be reading their own news releases.