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Interview with the Founder and President of London International Awards, Barbara Levy, during the London International Awards held in London on the 14th September 2011, by Olga Maczynska for events & trends. Olga Maczynska: Congratulations for this wonderful show tonight. Can you tell me how the London International Awards began?  Barbara Levy: I was working at the CLIO Awards and I became the International director over there. Through that I met quite a number of luminary people in Britain, real characters in the industry. At the time, there was the company Creative Circle based in the UK. It did not have a London based office, they had the idea to go international so they approached me to think of it. I did not really want to leave my job completely but I did a lot of research and I decided to talk to some people. They convinced me to follow that idea. First year’s jury was such a good jury that we were even accused of being a scam, since nobody had a jury like that at the time. O.M.: Has the competition been successful since then?  B.L.: In the first year of the running of the competition one of the agencies called me and asked for names of the winners and finalists from the previous year. I said that it was the first year of the competition and joked to let me check if maybe I sent them a bill for what they thought they entered. In the first year of the competition we had entries from around 35 countries which was extraordinary back then, and we just grew from there. Competition has been a success every year, except maybe three years ago at the time of economic recession. London International Awards is the only awards competition in the world where the same person is running it since 26 years. The competition was a challenge because it was London based, run by the American, with the biggest markets being Germany and Asia. So it was very confusing but that is how it became the international awards. O.M.: Could you explain the reasons for the creation of the NEW Category in this year’s competition? B.L.: The idea behind the NEW Category came out when the Chief Innovation Officer and I sat down together and tried to think of a new kind of medium. We could not really think about the name for it. When walking around the hotel in Las Vegas I thought why not call it simply ‘the new‘, because it does not define anything. Others thought I was joking but in the end we decided to call it that way. However, actually we had no idea what the category exactly was about. I was in the business for many years and the competition itself has always been engaged with the traditional media. Therefore, ‘new’ stands for something that people are creating in a completely new way, not only of advertising, but in connecting different forms of media. NEW Category defines a completely innovative mind set, based not so much on creativity, but on what the jury defines on the spot. O.M.: Is this the first year which has no maximum length limit for the entries and accepts longer, even documentary films?  B.L.: We actually do not really take documentaries and we have given up having maximum lengths for the entries, because nobody really adhered to it. We actually did think of taking short films maybe in next year’s competition. In this year’s competition, Morgan Spurlock came up with his documentary film POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. When Morgan Spurlock was entering his film we did not realise that it was the whole film he is entering. We thought it was just a concept of the film that he was entering. It ended up in the NEW Category. After a few days the jury called me and said that they have a real dilemma because Morgan Spurlock‘s film was completely different than anything and did not fit into what LIA is about. They asked me to decide if they can create a new award, specifically for Morgan Spurlock’s film. They were talking about creating the award called The Greatest Award Ever Sold. I said that the industry might look at it as a kind of award which is ‘sold for price’. Therefore, the jury proposed to me to find a sponsor for the award, although we never had sponsors before and I said ‘why not‘. We had an idea for a white statute for this award, the statute manufacturer said it was possible and so the award has been created.  O.M.: What do you think about his film itself?B.L.: We watched the film and I must say it is very much eye opening, and Morgan Spurlock’s work is very confrontational. O.M.: Looking into the future, could you say that next year’s competition will go more into the direction of social media? B.L.: We are talking about it, but the worst problem that the new jury has is that social media is not really what the competition should be about. So the Facebook page might get many hits but unless it has other reasons than to announce something it is not really what the jury considers to be a successful social media.  O.M.: Any final conclusions about the competition and perhaps any plans in mind for the 30th anniversary of LIA? B.L.: (Laughing) I have not even booked a ticket for my next week’s trip so I cannot even think about the 30th anniversary yet. We are going to judge again in Las Vegas next September and I am not sure whether or not we should be doing another major show regionally due to budgetary reasons. O.M.: Thank you very much. | |||||||||||
interview published:
http://www.eventsandtrends.com/index.php?menuid=27&content=1783
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