Telly Awards

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Official website
Telly Award
29th Telly Awards
Bronze Telly Award
Awarded for	Excellence in local, regional, cable, TV commercials, Non-Broadcast Video, TV Program
Presented by	Telly Awards
Country	United States
First awarded	1980

The Telly Awards "recognize distinction in creative work," honoring outstanding local and regional television commercials and productions, as well as non-broadcast video productions. Its recognition has been growing as of late years, becoming a reference and spawning a series of copycat awards.

1 History
- 1.1 Growing recognition
2 Choosing the winners
3 Past winners
4 Similar awards
- 4.1 same claims about awards
- 4.2 same claims about decisions
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] History

The Telly Awards were founded in 1980 by David E. Carter, a 7 time Emmy winner and Clio award winner who has written several books on corporate branding and design and has produced many sketches for the Johnny Carson show.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Growing recognition

Telly awards organizers claim that, in recent years, the Telly Award has become a highly sought award and that it is recognized as a true accomplishment in the field of Commercials and Television Programs. In 2008, the single entry fee is $60 and the campaign entry is $160. Yet this is not the only fee involved as winners are automatically charged an additional fee for their statues and certificates, $150 for US winners and $175 for international winners. This system has received hundreds of compliments^{[citation needed]}, since it lets Telly awards keep entry fees much lower than most all other competitions^[1].

[edit] Choosing the winners

Each entry is judged on its own merit, rather than against other entries. In each category there can be multiple Winners (Silver) and Finalists (bronze). There is no stated limit to the number of winners or finalists in any given category. The Telly Awards web site lists thousands of winners annually.

Official documentation provided to winners indicates that 7-10% of over 13,000 international entries receive Silver Telly Awards and 18-25% receive the Bronze Telly Award^[2], which means that between 25% and 35% of all entries receive an award. Organizers, on documents such as the 2007 call-for-entry, claim that entries do not compete against other but are judged on individual merit. They also claim that this scoring system is not unique, as they say that other awards (including the Emmy) have a non-compete judging and scoring system.

An Emmy and Silver Telly winner, Richard Friley, was the chairman of the judging panel for the 27th Annual Tellys, which had 25 judges, all of them being past Telly winners^[3], and for the 28th, which had 40 judges^[4].

[edit] Past winners

Some organizations have applied for Telly awards and won, some of them now list them together with their Emmy and not mentioning any other award, like NYC media group^[5] and New England Sports Network (NESN)^[6].

Other list their Telly awards along many other awards of arts and entertainment that they have won, like Emmies, Gold Award from NY Festivals, WorldFest remi awards, CINE eagle award, WGA Award from Writers Guild of America, American Film & Video Association's Red Ribbon, National Media Council Gold Mercury awards and Silver Hugo Award. They also sometimes include awards similar to Telly like Aurora, Aegis or Communicator. Those companies include Discovery channel ^[7], Jim Henson Company ^[8], Iowa Public Television^[9], Southeastern Channel ^[10], the U.S. Center for Veterans Enterprise (CVE)^[11], Microsoft ^[12] and other ^[13].

Actor Morgan Freeman won two Telly awards and was quoted as saying that he was very proud and honored. The award was for narrating NRCS public service announcements.^[14].

Once, the award was given to an interactive video of a fish tank, and the winning video was put up for auction on eBay^[15].

[edit] Similar awards

There is a host of younger awards that have copied the fee system and other key characteristics of Telly awards, like the lack of an award-giving public ceremony, not disclosing the name of judges, and using winners of past years as judges. That includes making elements on their websites very similar to Telly awards' website, with the similarities including things such as format of lists, percentage of winners and finalists, fees, using codes for categories and then using them on the winner list without explaining what category goes with each code (making it impossible for a web visitor to know in which category each award was given), all sort of sentences (sometimes word-by-word), privacy policy, benefits of winning, using RS Owens for the manufacturing of the statue, claims that their awards are on the level of Emmy and Oscar, online forms to enter competition and a long list of similarities that can't be explained by chance. This in one case extended to copy/pasting the privacy policy page from Telly's website and forgetting to replace the Telly name before posting it on their site^[16].

However, there is no website identical to Telly's website, and all of them have some characteristics that set them apart from the Telly award and some characteristics that are similar but not identical. The first appearance of Telly's website on the Internet is registered as May 2000^[17].

Aurora award [2]
Aegis awards [3] founded in 1981
Communicator award [4] founded in 1984
Davey awards [5] founded in 2005
Creativity awards [6] founded in 1980

[edit] same claims about awards

The Telly Awards website states that the awards were designed by the same firm that makes the Oscar and Emmy. ^[18]

The Aurora website states that the statues are cast in the same foundry that creates the Emmy, Oscar and Clio statues. ^[19]

"Redesigned statuette from the same firm that produces the Oscar® and Emmy® Awards." ^[20]

"The Davey Awards statuette is custom designed and handcrafted by Encore Awards, producers of the Golden Globe Award and other prestigious memorabilia" ^[21]

[edit] same claims about decisions

"Judges evaluate entries to recognize distinction in creative work — entries do not compete against each other. Instead, entries are judged against a high standard of merit." ^[22]

"Aegis Winners are decided on their own merits rather than by direct comparison to others." ^[23]

"This method allows programs to compete on their own merits rather than by arbitrary comparison with others." ^[24]

"Entries are judged to evaluate distinction in creative work. In determining Excellence and Distinction Winners, entries are judged on their merits based on a standard of excellence" ^[25]

"Entries are judged to evaluate distinction in creative work. In determining Gold and Silver winners, entries are judged on their merits based on a standard of excellence as determined by the IAVA" ^[26]