Company: Tech Museum of Innovation
Agency: Ketchum
Timeframe: 2003 to present
Budget: N/A (pro bono account)
The world of awards can roughly be divided into three very uneven parts. The first are the high-profile awards which inevitably generate endless speculation and consistently
grab front page attention: Nobel Prizes, Academy Awards, Heisman Trophies and Pulitzer Prizes fall into this category. Then comes those awards which may not have strong popular
name recognition but which nonetheless register within specific industries or activities. This category would include such laurels as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, business
journalism's Jesse H. Neal Awards, or (if you pardon the self-blown horn) this publication's PR News Platinum PR Awards.
Then comes the third category, which sort of straddles the two aforementioned worlds. The honors presented here are unique to a specific practice or audience, yet they could
easily find wider name recognition with the right PR push. The MacArthur Foundation Awards and the NAACP's Spingarn Medal are niche-based but inevitably generate
wide media coverage.
A new candidate for the third category seems to be the Tech Museum Awards, which began in 2001 by honoring (according to the award mission) "innovators using technology to make
the world safer and healthier, more prosperous and just." Yet gaining wide attention for the awards proved to be something of a PR challenge on several fronts.
For starters, there was the problem of the award's source: The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, which is well-known in Silicon Valley and the neighboring Bay Area
but is virtually unknown outside of its home region. Also, the awards were somewhat broadly defined in how technology was defined - health and medicine, environmental sciences,
even alternative electrical sources were covered - and thus made the awards difficult to pigeonhole.
And if that wasn't enough, the award competition was designed to have international appeal, but spreading the word across the globe required a wide PR reach that the museum
itself did not possess.
The museum worked with other PR agencies in 2001 and 2002 to promote the awards but was not satisfied with their results. In 2003 the museum entered into a partnership with the
San Francisco office of Ketchum, which agreed to take on the awards project as a pro bono project. Having outside assistance has been very helpful to the museum, since its
public relations operation is literally a one-person team.
"I am it!" exclaims Judy Peterson, the museum's public relations manager, who joined the institution shortly after New Year's. "It is a really, really big job and there's lots
of activity here between movie premieres, our Tech Challenge for high school students and the new exhibits that come in. The awards are a huge project, and from our point of view
Ketchum has been indispensable."
According to Aaron Heinrich, associate director of Ketchum's global technology practice, the agency took a multi-pronged PR approach that played on both the international
aspect of the Tech Museum Awards and the local aspect of the awards.
For starters, Ketchum and the museum eschewed the use of the words typically associated with award competitions, nominees and winners. Instead, the word "laureates" was
employed in all PR literature. "We want to make this feel more than just an award," explains Heinrich. "There is something academic to this, with a lot of research and testing
involved that elevates this above the normal type of award situation."
Ketchum also refashioned its PR focus, softening the technology aspect to focus more on the human side of honorees and less on the nuts-and-bolts (or bits-and-bytes, if you
will) of their work. "We wanted to recognize how technology benefits people," continues Heinrich. "We started by telling what people were doing with being heavily technological.
For instance, there was one group in a developing country that was using bicycles in creating energy to recharge batteries. That was how they considered technology - as opposed to
here, where we consider an iPod as technology."
The Tech Museum Awards consist of five categories, each sponsored by a major high-tech company: The Intel Environment Award, the Accenture Economic Development
Award, the Microsoft Education Award, the Agilent Technologies Foundation Health Award and the Knight Ridder Equality Award. Each award comes with a $50,000
honorarium and a statuette featuring a glass globe. Heinrich notes the five sponsoring companies to some internal PR for their respective awards, but are not actively promoting
their laurels.
Each category has five individuals or organizations whose nominations are announced two months prior to the award ceremony. To spread the word, Ketchum calls in its global
network of PR practitioners to generate coverage of the nominees in their local media.
"Once we get an idea of who the laureates for each category are, we notify all of the Ketchum offices pertinent to those 25 and begin pre-pitching them," says Heinrich. And no
corner of the globe is left untouched. In 2004, for example, this resulted in localized coverage for Tech Museum Award nominees across the United States and Canada and in such
far-flung locations as Australia, Brazil, Guatemala, India, Nepal and Uruguay. For 2005, Heinrich reports localized coverage was achieved in South African and Pakistani media.
Of course, no serious award competition is without its controversies, and the Tech Museum Awards had quite the brouhaha in 2005 when the U.S. State Department barred
nominated Cuban scientist Vicente Verez-Bencomo from traveling to San Jose for the awards ceremony. He helped develop a low-cost synthetic vaccine that prevents meningitis and
pneumonia in small children. Verez-Bencomo actually won the award and Heinrich reports the award was eventually delivered to him in Havana. Needless to say, the controversy
created a dramatic boost in media impressions: 9,421,765 on that aspect of the story alone, out of the more than 19 million media impressions for the 2005 campaign (which included
102 media outlets plus the Voice of America, which broadcast the award news to 44 countries).
Oddly, the one aspect of the awards that has traditionally not been a major media generator is the award gala itself. Part of the problem, at least from a local consideration,
is the fact a local NBC affiliate is the media sponsor for the event and rival network affiliates thus avoid sending camera crews. But this is not to say the event is
ignored: the major regional dailies (the San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle) have provided generous coverage of the gala.
Ketchum will be back for the 2006 awards, and nominations are already being accepted via the online entry form at http://www.techawards.org/nominate/.
Contacts: Aaron Heinrich, [email protected]; Judy Peterson, [email protected]