What Your Company Awards Ceremony Can Learn From The Oscars

The Oscars turned into a very good night for Everything Everywhere All At Once winning 7 of its Oscars including Best Picture. But how did the host do? After last year’s slap heard around the world, Kimmel had a heavy lift. How did he handle it? And how did they speed things up even with more awards? ANd how can you learn from their ceremony? Read on...

Use a Professional Host – Make it fun but nice.

This was a nice piece of work by Jimmy Kimmel. Navigating the parachuting in bit and then hopping into the monologue was fun without being too over the top. His remarks were in the “Kimmel-style” of unapologetic but light-hearted snark. He can be much crueler but was gentle enough that everyone was in on the joke. (I would argue that some of his jokes were much harsher than Chris Rock’s last year when he garnered the violent reaction of Will Smith.) Kimmel could have come out wearing a fencing mask or with bodyguards right from the get-go and used them as a foil throughout the monologue. There were lots of opportunities and he took the road least objectionable and I might add still pretty funny.?

If you can, hire a professional host, not a stand-up comedian who’s just looking for laughs. You want someone who has done this a bunch of times and can add years of experience to the proceedings. From someone tripping onstage (Elizabeth Banks last night and Jennifer Lawrence previously) to delayed responses or prolonged congratulations at their table to covering while pictures go on and on, a professional host is there to make the evening enjoyable for the entire audience including the 95% who are not receiving an award that night.

Make It Faster- Combine But Recognize

The Oscars had each pair of presenters present two or more awards. This made things move along at a steady pace and kept things engaging. This was a smart way of increasing speed and eliminating what can be cringe-worthy banter by people who are typically able to do multiple retakes of a given piece of dialogue. Your company can achieve the same thing by combining awards by region or district or have the picture and grip and grin occurring off to the side as the next winner is being announced. Remember, 95% of your audience are not winning an award so they’d like to go get a drink as soon as possible.

Add Multiple Elements – Short-Form Interstitials Are For Everyone

Adding the musical numbers back in and having the dance numbers added a ton of energy. The Naatu Naatu song and dance from RRR will live in my head for years. You can add similar elements by using your creativity. Perhaps a re-lyriced version of ?Life is a highway for your Field Sales Force. Or a couple of fun “instructional” tik-tok style videos; Or send your host into the audience to do some on-the-spot interviews. Nothing more than 90 seconds is just enough to re-engage your audience, keep it fun, and keep it moving.

Don't Do This – Don’t Make Note Of The Time?

The one thing I think Kimmel did wrong last night was to make fun of the time the awards would take. This takes away from the fun and signals an audience to be getting bored. Why instruct them, to get bored or that this is taking too long?

Instead, keep pointing out things that people are not noticing, who is sitting with whom, or the fact that the East region held their own awards earlier and the winners were (insert name of their customer). There are plenty of ways to make it interesting from having fun with how people are dressed (not make fun of but celebrate... that’s critical) to acknowledging things or actions that should be awarded like coming back to work on time after vacation on the beach and not wearing shorts! Or the best pet who is always featured in zoom calls.

Have you seen or done something cool at an awards ceremony? Share it in the comments!

Have an awards event coming up and want to make it special? Message me and let’s talk about how to make your next awards event a winner as well.