brand fiction wins big at Shorty Awards

The 2nd Annual Shorty Awards (for Twitter content) were held last night in Times Square and I'm thrilled to report that @BettyDraper won a Shorty in Innovation. Just as exciting for me was the fact that it was a big night for brand fiction. @FrankAdman (fictional art director from the 1960s) won for Advertising and @TrueBloodHBO (official profile of the show) won for Entertainment. Proof that a new kind of story telling for brands is getting attention.

A winner in the Brand category was @SesameStreet (tied with @WholeFoods) and one of the highlights of the evening was the chance to meet Grover and his "handler" Eric Jacobson.

For the first time, winners were chosen not only by popular Twitter vote, but by judging of a newly formed Academy whose members include Kurt Andersen and David Pogue. Congrats to the winners:

Advertising
Frank Adman, @FrankAdman
Application
TweetDeck, @TweetDeck
Art
deviantART, @deviantART
Brand (two-way tie)
Whole Foods Market, @WholeFoods
Sesame Street, @SesameStreet
Celebrity
Nathan Fillion, @NathanFillion
Cultural Institution (three-way tie)
Jonah Holland of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, @lewisginter
Reduced Shakespeare Company, @reduced
Poetry Society of America, @Poetry_Society
Customer Service
Bonnie Smalley, @ComcastBonnie
Design
Smashing Magazine, @smashingmag
Entertainment
TrueBlood HBO, @TrueBloodHBO
Finance
Suze Orman, @SuzeOrmanShow
Food 
Foodimentary, @Foodimentary
Government
Cory Booker, @CoryBooker
Health
Rachael Dunlop, @DrRachie
Humor (two-way tie)
David Thorne, @27bslash6
Mrs. Stephen Fry, @MrsStephenFry
Innovation
Helen Klein Ross's Betty Draper, @Betty Draper
Journalist (two-way tie)
William Bonner, @realwbonner
Rachel Maddow, @maddow
Literature
Arjun Basu, @arjunbasu
Music (two-way tie)
Ivete Sangalo, @ivetesangalo
Ted Leo, @tedleo
News
The Diane Rehm Show, @drshow
Nonprofit
To Write Love On Her Arms, @TWLOHA
Politics
The Nation, @thenation
Science 
Jen Scheer, @flyingjenny
Sports
Bill Simmons, @sportsguy33
Tech
Mark Watson, @soldierknowsbest
Travel
Paul Smith, @twitchhiker
Weird
The Llama, @DoWhatITellYou
Special Humanitarian Award
Carel Pedre, @carelpedre

an appeal to make the shorty awards, well, shorter

As my friends, family and followers on twitter are relieved to know, Shorty Award voting ended yesterday. I'm tickled that @BettyDraper finished in what appears to be 2nd place in the Innovation category, though rankings won't be announced until an awards ceremony on March 3.

So now that I've dusted myself off from the campaign trail, and had a chance to gain a little perspective, I'm thinking that if the Shorty Awards really mean to "Honor the Best Producers of Short Real-Time Content on Twitter" they ought to rethink the open voting.

Last year, Shorty winners were determined only by popular vote which meant that awards went to those with the most time and energy to devote to aggregating votes. At least one finalist, @SavvyAuntie, dropped out of the running for this reason. (Technically, she didn't drop out, but stopped asking for votes, which in a runoff determined by popular vote, is the same thing.) "It's not a fair awards ranking program. It's a popularity contest."

Anyone with a twitter account can be nominated (or nominate themselves) for a Shorty Award. The rules encourage nominees to "campaign and encourage their friends to vote for them." This is a great way to ensure that Shorty Awards is a top trending topic on twitter, but a lousy thing to do to the twitter community which is besieged for weeks with solicitations for votes from anyone with a hope of actually winning.

To their credit, Shorty Awards organizers are attempting to make the awards less about vote-getting this year and more about content creation by instituting another round in the process, a review by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. The name may be amusing, but the membership is impressive, including MC Hammer, David Pogue (NYTimes), Kurt Andersen (NPR), Frank Moss, (MIT media lab), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr) and Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.) According to the Shorty website, the Academy "will carefully review the finalists' tweets and fill out an anonymous survey with their choices for winners." What role their vote will play in determination of winners isn't clear, but their role is promised to be "vital."

Perhaps next year, the Academy could play an even more vital role, helping to nominate finalists. Should the Shorty evolve to be like other award shows that rely only on recognized experts in a field to identify excellence of others in it? (Imagine if the real Oscars were determined by how many votes actors could wheedle out of viewing audiences?) This being social media, I think the Shorty Awards needs to retain a social component in determination of winners. But couldn't the voting period be contracted? A month is a century in twitter time, interminable to contenders who must keep stumping for votes, excruciatingly long for the twitter community forced to endure so many appeals. Wouldn't an open voting period of a week or less be a relief to everyone?

Of course, despite my beef with an imperfect process, I'll be breathless as other finalists in Times Square on March 3, awaiting word of the winners, grateful there’s any recognition at all for an art still dismissed by so many as "frittering."

why i'm voting against @Adbroad in the Shorty Awards

If you've got other things on your mind besides social media, you might not have heard of the Shorty Awards. The Oscars of Twitter. Sans limos and red carpet and televised gala. Election is by popular vote and I'm jazzed to be a finalist in two categories: advertising and innovation.

The first round of voting was last week and there was a bit of a dust-up in advertising, the rare ad awards show in which Lee Clow isn't a frontrunner. @FrankAdman (a fictional art director from the 60s) accused @iwearyourshirt (a guy who wears other people's Tshirts for a living) of breaking the rules by getting robots to finagle votes. Turns out, boosting vote counts via robots (or humans in feverish imitation of them) isn't against the rules. But Shorty organizers reacted responsibly by re-weighting votes, assigning different values to tweets according to content and origin. Ah, the vagaries of life on the digital frontier.

Speaking of frontiers. Very few new ideas come along in advertising. But this may be one of them. Invent a fictional character---emphasis on invention. Don't appropriate a character from a TV show or film or book, a character you own no IP rights to. Invent an original character who can be made to do what you wish, gallivanting from twitter to facebook to youtube to...whatever the next social media platform will be. Use the character to build an audience. Then sell that audience like a media buy.

@FrankAdman appeared about the same time as AMC's Mad Men wandered into the twitterverse. He's a west coast art director living large in the 60s: chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, inventor of the virtual "Twittertini" which has evolved into the lexicon of social media-speak on Twitter. He now has over 14,000 followers. I don't know if @FrankAdman is for sale. But if I were Kodak or Clorox or Dewars or another brand with heritage in the 60s, I'd certainly put in a call. Er, a tweet.

I'm voting for @FrankAdman in the Shorty Awards because I love the idea of a fictional character winning in the advertising category again. (Last year's winner was the tweeter for Peggy Olson.) I want @FrankAdman and @BettyDraper to take home Shorty Awards this year. To help demonstrate the power of brand fiction in the digital universe.

I'm only sorry we'll have to pull AdBroad's campaign commercial.

To vote for Frank, go to the Shorty polls here. Vote for Betty here.

adbroad IRL

Last night at the Shorty Awards, I passed out my in the real world info on recipe cards from the kitchen of Betty Draper. And agreed to be outed by The Wall Street Journal. What a scene, those Shortys. Turquoise daquiris (twitter's fail whale color), wandering astronaut in helmet, faces you're used to seeing half-inch square on a screen suddenly attached to a body and talking to you. Now that I'm outed, should I switch my avatar for my pic? But I like having a blonde wave and that 60s demeanor.

who the hell is adbroad anyway

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the movie Three Faces of Eve. Incredible to me that three people could exist in one. Back then, it was called Multiple Personality Disorder. Now it's called Convergence. I'm finding it takes way too much energy to keep up separate identities. And doing so no longer seems important. I advise brands to aggregate their identities across platforms. Now I'm taking my own advice. Along with Peggy Olson, Betty Draper is "coming out" at the Shorty Awards. Spoiler alert: she looks nothing like January Jones.