Creative City finalists

Here are the Creative City Awards finalists, with thanks to Big Cat (who provided the list) and Dave Harte (who provided the links):

The Regional Outstanding Business Development Award:
Bubblequest Ltd
Internet Arrow
Digital Native Academy Ltd

The Birmingham Outstanding Business Development Award:
Electric Cinema
Substrakt Limited (blog)

Innovation Award:
Adwords Expert Ltd
LHM Media (blog)
IE Design Consultancy Ltd (blog)

Outstanding Market Development Award:
Fierce Earth Ltd (blog)
D A Recordings Ltd (blog)
Fused (blog)

The Best Brand Award:
D A Recordings Ltd (blog)
Violectra trading as Unison Strings Ltd
IE Design Consultancy Ltd (blog)

Creative Industries Award:
D A Recordings Ltd (blog)
Stan’s Cafe (blog)
Fierce Earth Ltd (blog)

The awards themselves are on 29 Nov.

Firstly, congrats to all the peeps nominated – no matter your opinion on awards generally, a bit of free publicity and a £2,000 cheque is reason enough to try and win one of these.  A few thoughts on the nominations though:

  • Does SEO (Internet Arrow) count as ‘creative’ these days?
  • Just how is business consultancy (Bubblequest) ‘creative’?
  • Pay-per-click advertising (Adwords Ltd)? ‘Creative’? Eh?

3 of the 14 companies nominated (21%) have got me scratching my head and wondering why they’re there. No offence to the companies nominated, of course, but did the organisers not receive any more relevant applications? Is that why there’s only two nominations for the Birmingham business development award?

*Update* – Parboo (not her real name) has noticed that there’s been no announcement of nominations for the Newcomer Award.

20 Comments

  1. Jurgen

    Chris, it’s a simple mistake. You’ve got the list from last year’s event muddled up with this year’s. I was there and it was DA Recording, Fused, Stans Cafe, Fierce who won. You’re not suggesting that Birmingham hasnt moved on this year are you?

  3. A little askew of Chris’ question, but I’m particularly interested to find out who’s responsible for the Creative City Awards logo……

  4. Charlotte – yes, the definition’s pretty close. The eligible creative sectors for the awards are “advertising, design & visual arts, heritage and museums, performing arts, publishing, music, screen based media and radio, software”

    I can understand the creative input on advertising campaigns generally but SEO and pay-per-click? And business consultancy?

  5. And there was me slaving away for many minutes over finding all the links for the finalists only for Chris to nick my hard work and for the heated debate to be over here instead of at my place. Darn it.

    Some further reading, listening and watching:

    There’s a list of last year’s winners over at the Digital Central site.

    There’s a podcast with Mohammed Zahir from BCC over at Biz TV. There’s also some videos from previous years:
    2004
    2005
    2007

    See there I go again doing all the leg work whilst CIB gets all the debate…

  8. I am saddened by the categories as there is little recognition of the creative businesses that are essentially individuals. From my time on the AWM Screen, Image and Sound COG, it was a constant source of debate initiated by the music sector that we had no effective way of measuring these micro businesses that have significant impact. This looks like same old stuff to me, but maybe I am missing the point here, that the awards are set up by a part of the creative industries to celebrate itself.

  10. Good copywriting (which effective seo and ppc advertising rely on) has always been part of the creative industry as I’ve known it, but this does seem a pretty dull list on the face of it. Of course, it is just a list, there’s no explanation of the projects that these companies have nominated themselves for. I’d be surprised if the link for Adwords Ltd is correct though. Apart from being a terrible website, providing no contact details, delivering all its text as images and spelling ‘professional’ wrong, it seems to be particularly targeted at a US audience.

  11. Billy – maybe I’m too much of a purist but I’m still not sold on the creativity of SEO and PPC. You’re right though, I’ve not seen any (potentially perfectly good) explanations for their nominations.

    You’re right on Adwords Ltd too. I suspect the list should say Adwords Expert Ltd (based in Moseley) whose website is http://www.adwords-expert.co.uk/ (link above amended).

    Dave – apologies but I didn’t realise you (or Kenny or the Bham Post for that matter) were trying to spark a debate and didn’t intend to steal any thunder.

    For the record (and to defend my honour) I looked up the names of the companies that weren’t familiar to me (Bubblequest, DA Recordings, Adwords, IE Design, Internet Arrow, Violectra, LHM and Digital Native) when I saw Kenny’s post. I originally copied Kenny’s list for this post and started adding links but replaced it with your one (credited) when I saw I was just duplicating work.

  12. I was only jesting Chris – always happy to get info onto CIB – badge of honour in fact.

    Digital Native Academy are great by the way. Serious Games applications in community setting. Done work with Microsoft amongst others. Did a project in Sandwell called Gaming the Tibby (more here

  16. it’s worth remembering that the creative city awards are (a) self-nominating, & (b) all about the business side of running a creative business, rather than the creative side of it.

    this isn’t to defend either the awards in general or this year’s list, but it may explain what appear to be odd choices & omissions.

  17. @simon_gray in that case, wouldn’t a better name for the event be the Creative Business Awards? That could have real legs, and could even work nationally.

    Instead of awards for design, filmmaking and so on based on the quality of the end product/service like all the others, an award based on the quality of strategy/business development could be really interesting. (You could argue against pretty easily too, but hey.)

    I guess the problem here is one of perceptions (I’ve won two of these awards and haven’t entered again) but I thought it was just an awards ceremony for anyone working in creative industries!

    Shows what I know… but I did think it was odd that I was trying to find a category to nominate Emily and found it difficult even though she has a great story (new mum, finishing a PhD, starting a successful business single-handed, etc.)

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