"Award winning" has a nice ring to it, and this title could be on the horizon for your business this year...
The Horizon Interactive Awards, now in its 12th season, announced its Call for Entries to recognize excellence in interactive media production. Mike Sauce, the founder/president of Horizon Interactive Awards, encourages different parties to enter.
"The accolades for development teams and other project contributors are a validation to the great work that they produce," said Sauce. "From an agency perspective, receiving an award from the Horizon Interactive Awards also serves as validation to their clients about how well they are measuring up, from an online perspective, among their competition in the marketplace."
This year's competition features seven distinct categories: Web, Mobile Apps, Video, Interactive, Print, Email and Advertising. Its individual honors within those seven categories reflect industry trends.
"Last year, we introduced the Responsive / Mobile design category under the Website medium," said Sauce. "I anticipate this will continue to grow as more and more websites are being developed/redeveloped to adhere to a more responsive framework and CSS. In addition, we added more industry sector specific categories to allow sites to achieve a more specific recognition within their sector. For example, we added the Bank/Finance, Restaurant/Food Industry, Legal, Towns & Municipalities and Travel and Tourism categories."
The Horizon Interactive Awards entry deadline is Dec. 20, 2013. For perspective, in 2012, the competition received more than 1,000 entries from 25 different countries around world and nearly all 50 US states.
"While entries from the USA have remained on a steady pace, we have seen incremental growth in the amount of entries from the international stage," said Sauce. "This is very exciting to us because marketing the competition outside of the USA is a challenge but the increase in popularity internationally is a sign of being established and recognized worldwide."
So, how are the Horizon Interactive Awards judged? In addition to an all-volunteer and international panel of judges, the competition forms an end-user panel to provide an initial phase to judging.
"We believe that sites/projects that are entered in the Horizon Interactive Awards competition must not only be judged by creatives, but by casual users of the Internet as well," said Sauce. "These, after all, are the majority of the audience for those very projects."
Once the deadline passes, Horizon Interactive Awards' staff begins the process of organizing the judging process.
"There is typically a period of 2-3 months (depending on the number of entries received) where we are focused on determining the winners and insuring that the judging panel can access all of the entries to be scored," said Sauce. "Once the judging process is complete, winners are announced on the website, social media and postal mail."
Additionally, for 2013, Horizon Interactive Awards added new categories and refined others. Most notably:
NEW
- Websites / Legal
- Email / E-card
- Email / Newsletter
- Email / Promotion
- Interactive / Kiosk, Public Exhibit or Museum
REFINED
- Print / Advertisement
- Print / Branding Campaign
- Print / Brochure
- Print / Poster
- Advertising / Online Ads
- Advertising / Integrated Campaign
