Watch the People’s Choice Awards last night? This year they added a great interactive feature where you could go to the cool flashy voting thing on their Web site and cast your vote in four categories, with votes being tallied all the way up through the first half of the live awards show itself. Sweet!
Of course, two of those categories were never, at any point, expressly mentioned during the telecast. Those would be Favorite Online Sensation and Favorite User-Generated Video, the online-only awards, which apparently were popular enough to drum up some Internet buzz and traffic for the PCA site but not enough to, you know, explicitly acknowledge on camera in any audible way.
This follows the pattern set by last year’s Emmy Awards, which included an online-only poll for people to vote for TV’s Most Memorable Moments, winners to be shown during the Emmy broadcast, only none of them ever were, probably because they barely had enough time to cram in all the long, cringe-inducing bouts of reality-show-host banter as it was. Why show a moment from the history of television which touched the hearts of millions when you could just let Howie Mandel rant aimlessly for another 10 minutes?
(Of course, it could be a conspiracy. Joss Whedon’s show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” won the “TV’s Most Memorable Moments, Drama” Emmy last spring and his “Dr. Horrible” won Favorite Online Sensation last night; maybe there’s some sort of legendary Hollywood prophecy, whispered amongst the ancient executives, that California will sink beneath the waves if someone is ever foolhardy enough to hand him an award?)
So we’re good enough to fan the flames of buzz, give marketers something to do and make the awards shows seem marginally more relevant, but we don’t get to sit at the big kids’ table at the ceremony. Fair enough, fair enough. Especially since I don’t watch the awards shows on TV anyway.
They’re a lot better online.
After all, those are the people’s choice…
Perhaps the answer is to sue them for false advertising. After all, the vote website specifically stated: “Vote for your favorites, then tune in to see the winners.”
Yeah, but they could weasel out since they didn’t specifically say “see ALL the winners.” We did get to see two of them; the ones we would have seen even without the Web thing.
I don’t think I’ll be bothering with any more awards show tie-in promo stunts, me.