I watched the SAG awards on Sunday night just like millions of other U.S. households and while walking into work the next morning, I had a fleeting thought, “what other industry continuously awards its employees for their performance?” In three months time, there’s the Golden Gobes, the Academy Awards and the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards where actors, producers, directors, etc receive awards for their performances while millions of Americas watch at home.
And then I stumbled onto the reason why award shows are so prevalent in the entertainment business and it is larger than just pure entertainment value. It uses the awards platform as branding for its industry and the end result is that it keeps entertainment relevant and puts money into industry executive’s pockets.
Let’s take the film niche of the entertainment business for example. Once an actor/producer/director wins an Emmy for instance, instantly movies that star those winners feature “Academy Award winner XX, or produced by Golden Globe winner XX…” And the actor/producer/director doesn’t even have to win to give the movie a reason to use the award. How many times have you seen or heard, “Academy Award nominee, XX…?”
Although I haven’t seen any statistics, I feel very confident about the fact that once an award show’s nominees become public, Americans feel compelled to see those movies and surely once a winner is announced, sales for that increase as well.
The residual value from an award show is endless and the real reason that the industry puts on these ostentatious awards presentations if you will is all a result of branding. And what’s even more is that the entertainment executives have even fooled the general public into thinking the awards shows are another form of entertainment.
