Giving Credit Where It's Due

I like to give credit where it’s due.

Unfortunately, in my industry, the people who put in the most hours, who have to drink the most coffee, and who get hosed most often due to last-minute hiccups, discoveries or scope changes are the ones who have some of the most thankless jobs.

That’s why I fell in love with the idea of the Hive Awards, which recognize those whose contributions often go unnoticed or unappreciated.

After all, when was the last time you’ve been to a website and thought to yourself, “Boy! I’m so glad that I can view this website in Explorer 6, Safari, AND Firefox,” or “Wow, the CMS on this site must have been a real beast!”

You probably haven’t.

If Everything is Right, We Don’t Notice

In our jobs we may have developed the discipline to look for ancillary details, but in practice as consumers, we just don’t function that way. When it comes to all of that, except for those who have a vested interest in and a responsibility for producing websites that actually satisfies the wants and needs of people and organizations, as consumers we are all hopeless egoists.

When using the Internet, at any given point in time, the most important needs are our own. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to us if a website looks right in Opera – unless we prefer to use Opera as our Internet browser. Then it only matters if it doesn’t work right.

In fact, we typically only take notice when something doesn’t work. We don’t marvel when we can use something the way we want to use it.

When we buy a recommended book on Amazon, we’re conditioned to fly right through the process (and maybe add an impromptu gift wrap along the way), we have no idea the number of hours that were spent checking and fixing that process so that it’s so easy you barely notice that you’ve just forked over $20.

And that’s a real shame, because the lack of gratuitous animation, epic photography or “pizzazz” notwithstanding, Amazon.com is a real work of art. For Amazon’s most frequent customers, it isn’t just a utility, it’s an extension of themselves; it’s just what they do to get what they want.

Award Shows Treasure Pizzazz

Its “design” may not win any awards that account folks and art directors covet, but its design does generate more online revenue than any other retailer in the world. Sadly, an industry accustomed to rewarding the “creative” disciplines (art directors, writers) has been slow to recognize the contributions of those in less glamorous professions – which include some of the most creative people I’ve met – people who aren’t generally acclaimed as such.

Working at an interactive agency with deep roots in traditional advertising, every day I walk by all the awards we’ve won for creativity. The awards are good for what they are, and they typically bring esteem to (most of) the right people. But they are woefully inadequate for giving due recognition for the creativity of those perceived as having “technical” or “production” job titles.

And as the award shows tried to catch up with the burgeoning interactive discipline within their ranks, they tended to favor “clever” or “popular” over “effective.”

Enter the Hive Awards

Along came the Hive Awards, the brainchild of Alan Wolk, which gave companies a chance to recognize the very real and significant contributions, be they creative or otherwise, of people the advertising world typically recognizes as “bit players” in the quest for a “big idea.”

The truth of the matter is that not every big idea makes a big splash. But it’s hard to compete in traditional award shows with those sites that do make a big splash.

The Hive Awards have multiple categories across multiple industries – so that, in their words, “a truly innovative b-to-b insurance site is not directly competing with mtv.com.”

So if you haven’t entered yet, please think about how you can recognize those who continually and quietly save your company’s bacon with the help of countless hours into the morning and gallons of coffee.

Tomorrow (December 31) is the last day to qualify for an early-entry discount, but even if you miss that deadline, it’s still worth it, if you have created a truly remarkable product that would otherwise go unnoticed. Enter now.