Anyone won a Bronze Telly this year?
 

Have you heard anything from them, how about those that didn't win anything?

I had two entries this year. I see that they list the Silver Winners on line, but not the Bronze, (even though they have it setup). In past years when I had an entry that didn't win, I received a form letter, this year bupkis. They have not even responded to two emails asking the status.

I had sworn off the Telly's since they would not even give a clue as to their "judging" criteria. The response I got was "everything from top to bottom." I know when I judged for the AP in Radio, we had a definitive list of criteria. How do you assign a number calue to "everything from top to bottom" but I wil stay away from my rant. Suffice it to say I had clients who wanted them entered, which I did, but now they want to know what happened, and I'm at a loss to tell them.

The only thing I know for certain is the entry fee checks were cashed.

This is my personal opinion - nothing more.

But I find absolutely NO value in any award where there's no way to determine the criteria by which the entries are judged.

The Telly's have NEVER been a "peer review" award, in the sense that they disclose who's judging them or what criteria they use.

And without knowing this judging criteria - the Telly's can mean NOTHING about whether your work is equal to, superior to, or deficient compared to any one else's.

In fact, although I have no basis to allege anything nefarious in their business practices, the math in this is kinda daunting. Their website claims that they have about 13,000 international entries a year. (At 60 bucks an entry, that's 3/4 of a MILLION bucks in cash flow!) That's anything from commercials up to feature length training programs. Lets be conservative and call the average entry 10 minutes in length. So just to watch and judge those programs, there are 2,166 hours required to just WATCH the entries. They claim 40 judges. Which means each judge has to watch 54 hours of videos - or approximately 300 individual entries.

Right there, I'm gonna say that if I was doing the judging and I put in DVD # 173 and I saw it was 43 minutes long and it didn't grab me in the first couple of minutes, I'd be SORELY tempted to hit the eject button. I'm not saying these folks do that - just that I'd be tempted.

Plus they say that about 25% of so of entrants (3200 or so) are "winners" - who then have to pay an extra $150 as an "award fee" to get their statue. (That would generate an additional half million bucks) Plus, and here's the big troubling factor. The more people "win" - the MORE CASH FLOW THE TELLY's GENERATE!

So for my money, this makes the Telly's a simple 1.2 million buck a year generating business. NOT a "merit awards" deal.

I'd welcome someone who understands the inner working of these so-called "awards", telling me differently. But I'm sorry, I see the Telly process as a whole lot of folks buying themselves a plaque for the wall that probably wholesales for under $40 bucks in bulk (if not a WHOLE lot less) for around $210. Period.

It'll fool some clients who don't know better. But in my experience any true industry insider will, at BEST, smile tolerantly when you mention winning one of these.

I'm open, however, to anyone who want's to argue differently.

Bill,

I have an idea, you and me, we start the "Double Bill Awards" and rake in the do re mi, whaddya say? LOL

I agree with you, which is why I swore them off, but some internal clients wanted to enter. Now I cannot even get them to respond to email, Telly that is.