Portland Rosey Awards Smackdown vs Nosey Awards, Twitter and the Social Web
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Aaahh the social web. As you can see in the image above, the Portland Ad Federation has an annual awards fest, The Roseys, that honors local agencies who provide the best creative work in marketing and advertising or, as a quick Google search returns, “Portland Advertising Federation: Celebrating 100 Years of Setting the Standard for Portland’s Creative, Design, and Media Community!” [I have a problem with that byline - can an advertising federation set 'the standard' or should the federation be setting standards?] Anyway, I digress.
So, as noted above, PAF has recently launched a web site created by Anthill Marketing for this year’s show, with the motto – “Nothing Says I’m Better Than You Like A Rosey” and “Our City Is Better Than Your City.” On the site you can ‘spin a wheel’ [whoop-de-doo] and a needle comes to rest on such intelligent phrases as the ones below:
Austin: “Award winning copy in Austin: Yee-Haw”
Boulder: “There are two things Alex Bogusky can never take away from you: your pride and your Rosey”
Seattle: “Fast Company’s 2009 most creative city. How depressing is that?”
San Francisco: “Goodby this, Goodby that. Fuck Goodby”
Vancouver B.C.: “Remember, this is the city that brought you Alan Thicke and Lover Boy”
Well, well, well… [another side note: you've all heard of a band called The Weakerthans right?]
I’ll cut to the chase – I can see exactly what Anthill/PAF were trying to achieve – “edginess” “talking points” “hope this goes viral” etc etc. Basically they want a social media smackdown; bring it on, Portland will fight that fight, look at our logo we are raising the finger at you, yeah you San Francisco and you Goodby…. unfortunately it comes across as if we’re back in high school here, meanwhile not all of Portland’s creative community has embraced the tone of this campaign.
And so, along comes The Nosey Awards! Two Portland creatives [egged on by me I have to admit,] @adognamedpants and @motorcoatdave, created that site along with the Twitter name @noseyawards and the Twitter search hashtag #noseys. Finally things get interesting…
Here’s a fact – on Twitter no one owns a hash tag. For instance, here’s one #nooneownsahashtag. There, I just created it but I can’t own it because the Twitter community owns it by using it. And so it goes with #roseys and #noseys. Anthill and PAF cannot own #roseys and now that #noseys has come along and is being used by Twitter users who follow the thread, the two hash tags become joined at the hip…take a look at my TweetDeck grab below:
The Rosey Awards can’t shake off the Nosey Awards, they are now one and the same. Wherever the Roseys try to go on Twitter the Noseys will be right alongside. The Roseys and the Noseys can now duke it out all summer long. And this is a good thing. The Noseys are creating a ton of brand awareness for the Roseys – a rising tide lifts all boats. As people pile on this particular bandwagon, both pro and con, those little hash tags will be used thereby elevating the experiential awareness of the Roseys across an extremely wide arc. A campaign like this fits rather neatly into my idea of Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web.
The Roseys and the Noseys smackdown will be worth watching and I know it will create an interesting case study; it might even get more people to join the current 25 people on the Roseys FaceBook Group.
