I cannot be the only person in this industry to find the ever growing list of industry awards to have become laughable. Now we're adding categories to increase the amount of winners. Do you not realize how this makes a mockery of the award itself. Me? I'm a male, 50 +, working in the north west side of Toronto, working in a publishing company of under 10 people, in magazines and online. Is there an award for that? C'mon folks. There was a day winning awards in our industry meant something. Now I walk into agencies and clients who have an insane number (many quite dated) of awards on display, from corporate bodies or associations I've never heard of. The time has come to get real!

Dear Anonymous,

Thanks for your comment. We understand your sentiment as we are deluged with calls for entries from numerous awards events, too.

We are biased, of course, but we do believe there is real value to an awards program, and judging by the increasing number of entries we receive to our awards programs each year, it appears other publishers believe this, too.

Winning an award has many benefits, including:

• putting your company on the map and keeping it top of mind
• giving a competitive edge over competing titles
• boosting staff morale
• clients and employees want to work with winners
• studies show award-winning works has greater business returns

Strategy magazine recently published a good column about why creative people should care about awards. The column focuses on advertising awards but its points are equally true, I believe, for editorial and design:
http://www.strategyonline.ca/articles/magazine/20110201/forumjohn.html

Ya there is category creep (guilty), but new categories typically reflect new trends so that new kinds of work can be recognized too; tablet editions being just one example in the case of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.

We look forward to this year's competition and continue to hope that you will enter your award-winning work, too.

Regards,
Doug